The Mermaid

Eli Mann yearns for an opportunity to quit his job as a coffee company newsletter writer. Making matters worse, his older sister bullies him, his elderly mother thinks little of him, and his girlfriend recently left him. A fork in the road appears when Eli meets a stunningly beautiful blonde woman, Inga Magnussen, a sales rep for a Danish wind power company. Inga and Eli, they quickly discover, share the same progressive values, and soon afterward are romantically involved. Eli's good luck continues when an old high school friend, Turner Whitlock, asks him to research and then write an expose about the U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, Tex Bullard, an extreme right-wing climate change denier who's contemplating a run for president. Urged on by Inga and realizing that Bullard is clearly a dangerous person who could easily ruin the country if elected, Mann sets out on a surrealistic odyssey that takes him from Malibu to Aspen, and places in between. Alternately comical and sad, The Mermaid exposes the character of one man, as well as the dark underside of the America we currently live in.