Characters in Search of a Plot in Ensemble Cast Films

If you are writing a film that has a large cast all with important parts but without the story jumping back and forth between time frames, you’ll find people referring to it as an ‘ensemble cast film’.  

Huge damage has been done internationally to many ensemble cast scripts because  the form is not recognized as being different from the conventional one hero/one journey model, with their own structural mechanisms.  This results in characters in search of a plot or scripts dominated by redundant and uninteresting single heroes who pull focus away from the heat of the film, which in these films is the group. 

Why?  If you work on the assumption that film structure is always about one hero on a single journey towards spiritual improvement, you have only two options when you come to write a story that you know has multiple stories and a group of equally important characters. Either you say that because your ensemble story doesn’t conform to the one hero/one story structure it can work without any structure at all (which results in films that are characters in search of a plot - see the column on the left and the article when character driven means characters in search of a plot).  

Alternatively, you can try to force your ensemble story into the standard one-hero model by choosing one character to be 'the hero' - and end up with a dreary hero and your group providing color in the background. Tandem narrative films (same theme, different adventures, see below) suffer most from the ‘characters in search of a plot’ syndrome, while multiple protagonist stories (same team, same adventure, see below) suffer most from extraneous heroes.

Ensemble films are valid narrative forms with their own structural make-up. They are, and have always been used all the time all over the world (including the US) whenever writers want to write about individuals in a social context or about society at large. They appear whenever scripts seek to explore the restrictions imposed by external social factors, as in films about class, race, religion, gender, law, family, peer group and the like. Almost all war films and films about troubled families are ensemble stories, as are almost all films about social minorities—inevitably because such films are about social interaction and about the demands of social roles and social responsibility.

While the spiritual journeys of a sole individual is an important and perennial topic, there is absolutely no reason why all films should be about this, and indeed, in practice they aren’t.

 A huge number of films from all over the world are ensemble cast films; indeed, any publicity photograph that gives equal prominence to three or more characters is liable to be one, and the output of many countries is heavily weighted in favor of ensemble cast stories. Examples include American Beauty, The Full Monty, Glass Onion.

Below, again, are the three types of film often called 'ensemble films, all different in structure and philosophy

Tandem narrative. Examples are: Nashville, Love Actually and Pan’s Labyrinth.

A good motto for tandem narrative is: ‘same theme, different adventures’.

Multiple protagonist narrative. Examples are: American Beauty, Little Miss Sunshine, Saving Private Ryan.

The motto here is: ‘same team, same adventure’.

Double journeys narrative. The best known example is Brokeback Mountain.

The motto here is: ‘two lives in parallel’.