“Camera Store” Review: A Slow-Paced Character Study

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Camera Store is an interesting piece of work from writer/director Scott Marshall Smith. Taking place entirely over the course of Christmas eve, 1994. Staring John Larroquette and John Rhys-Davies as Pinky and Ray, two aged employees of a small independent camera store in a small and unremarkable suburban mall.

The film itself is primarily a character study as they struggle with the slow acceptance that their lives and careers are echoing the twilight of the film-camera era. Digital cameras have appeared on the scene and they know that they can only scoff and brush off the advance of time (and technology) for so long.

One of the primary challenges of the story is that the characters never have much of an arc. They start the day with an uncertain future, and they end it in the same place. Nothing really happens beyond a handful of characters coming in and out of the store to present various conversations to highlight their rapidly diminishing relevance.  Their mall and store should have been bustling with holiday shoppers, but instead it’s nearly empty – in itself a not too subtile reference to the men’s respective lives.

Having a flow that would feel more at home on the stage, it suffers to find a direction to take the audience in as a film. It’s as if the entire film is the setup to a story, but it ends before we ever get started. It’s understood that the script was based on the real-life experiences of Smith, so while one can feel that the scenes represent vignettes of those times, but a series of moments by themselves do not a story make.

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