Nobel Son
directed by Randall Miller
written by Jody Savin, Randall Miller
starring Alan Rickman, Mary Steenburgen, Danny DeVito, Brian Greenberg, Shawn Hatosy, Bill Pullman, Eliza Dushku
OK, this is either a work of pure and lasting genius or it’s complete schlock and deserves to fall flat on its pock marked face and dragged down a gravel road. Either way, it leaves something akin to an impact on the viewer and that’s really all a film can ask for.
The plot as far as there is one is so highly convoluted and ridiculous that one ends up laughing at the sheer ludicrousness of it all. It involves a poor bastard named Barkley Michaelson (Greenberg) who is attempting to write his PhD thesis on cannibalism. He’s a true believer and one can easily imagine him dragging a wee lass into the bushes and making a stew out of her entrails. His dad Eli (Rickman) has just won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and is heading out overseas to retrieve it along with his wife Sarah (Steenburgen) and Barkley. Unfortunately Barkley gets sidetracked after meeting a complete wack job named City Hall (Dushku) with whom he manages to sleep with. He rushes home in a cab and finds his parents gone. He is whacked across the head with a bat and soon finds himself bound, gagged and with a bag over his head. Thus begins Barkley’s epic adventure that leads absolutely nowhere. Maybe to hell.
Eli Michaelson is a complete prick who imagines himself to be something of a genius. He screws his students at every opportunity and seems hardly to have been able to keep his trousers zipped for much of his career. His attitude is utter contempt for his lessors and most of his colleagues so his little award is perceived by most to have been undeserving. His pomposity is greeted with disdain and his overall character is highly dubious at best. Barkley loathes him because he failed to follow in the great man’s footsteps and is reminded of his failure on a daily basis.
Barkley’s captor turns out to be the rather ingenious Thaddeus James (Hatosy) who has a penchant for removing the thumbs of those he accosts. He claims to have been the illegitimate spawn of his mother and Eli who was his father’s best friend and the true genius behind the formulas that spurred the work that won Eli the Nobel Prize. He’s pissed and wants Eli to pay for his father’s subsequent suicide. Soon, he and Barkley undertake a scheme to make the aging profligate pay for his many misdeeds. Up until this point the story maintains a certain gritty logic. It breezes by with tremendous energy and each scene is jacked up for maximum potency. It’s all sex and giddy violence and moments of grand, eloquent angst. But quickly everything turns and the film seems to get caught up in the intricate web it has created for itself.
From this point on the film just gets nuttier and less comprehensible. Suffice to say the scheme works and the two men split the haul and everything is back to normal. Well, it would be but the creators of this film insist on plying us with little doses of poison mixed well into the most vile yet effective energy drink known to man. We don’t know whether to be sick or buzzed out of our skulls.
The film is vibrant and exceedingly vivid. It looks like a great night out with that hot stripper whose daddy used to make her play a most despairing game when she was a little girl. There is a spoken word club where all the poems are about excrement, abuse, disease and other fun topics destined to be gathered together in some ode to dissolution scrap book. The reference to cannibalism, rape, murder, and other forensic niceties provide the film with quite a few laughs. The tenacity of these poets is a hilarious sendup of the type of thing that ought to be left in journals and not be broadcast to the world. The sickly ooze of these scenes coats the narrative and creates an atmosphere of degradation and torment that is played for big laughs and it mostly works to that end.
So, events conspire neatly and lead to a final showdown where some of the energy is drained from the film. Thaddeus’s brilliance for mayhem is sucked out of the film and replaced with the devious machinations of the much less vital Barkley who concocts yet another wholly destructive scheme that lacks the comic brutality of the first one. It’s all very strange and off kilter at first but becomes more generic as the film moves forward. The film works best when Thaddeus is working his magic and once he slips into obscurity it loses its direction slightly. The character of Barkley just isn’t fascinating enough and anything he does lacks even a semblance of viability.
At one point City Hall’s artwork is examined and the opinion expressed is that it comes from a disturbed mind. She certainly possesses a quirky derangement that is felt from the moment she appears on screen. She is the tortured poet/artist who has succumbed to mythologizing her own excrement and all the filth and despair she can fling at passerby. She is in many ways a satire of the scared little school girl reading Ann Sexton in the dark and carving ancient symbols along the inside of her thigh. She wears her damage so clearly on her vest until it just grinds itself into self-parody and she simple withers away. City Hall celebrates her agony because she so desperately craves validation for her martyrdom. She is so typical of a certain type who insists that the world actually cares about their petty concerns regarding the litany of torments they have experienced in their sad little lives.
There are many implausible moments scattered throughout this film but they somehow do not get in the way of the overall trajectory. Sure, they are absurd and fallacious but they are presented with such cool certainty that it’s easy to overlook them and wait for the next oddball sequence to manifest itself. The energy of the picture carries it most of the way through although as mentioned it does manage to stumble over its own cleverness. Everything just doesn’t add up in the end although the end does possess a certain logic but just not in accordance with the film as a whole.
The performances in this film are a mixed bag. Mary Steenburgen is tough, vital and wholly capable in this film. Her character is the backbone of the piece and the only one who seems stable. Alan Rickman is a delight to watch throughout this film. His annoyances at everything are truly delectable and nobody is as good as Rickman at walking around as if he is perpetually smelling something completely foul. Rickman plays the ass better than anyone these days and has managed to create two world class snobs in both this film and this year’s “Bottle Shock.” Brian Greenberg lacks star quality and can’t quite carry the film in the scenes when he is the central agitator. He’s too bland and ineffectual and his character’s plight doesn’t much matter in the end. Danny DeVito has a small but effective turn as a former OCD sufferer who still twitches and seems confused by his own shadow. His character truly is a little man struggling to make sense of the world as he interprets it. Shawn Hatosy is the real breakout performer here. Despite all we learn about his character he still comes off as exceedingly sympathetic and worth getting behind. Thaddeus possesses the skills and intellect that are infinitely watchable and it is a shame that the film shifts to Barkley in the second half. Eliza Dushku plays mad quite effortlessly and she definitely brings a sexy breath of fresh air into the proceedings. She injects the film with much needed erotic appeal and her frenzied sexuality perfectly accentuates the tone of the film.
Overall, this film is confusing, strange, and kinetic throughout and it manages to confound and irritate at every turn. It is a flawed film but the flaws are administered with charm and wit so they don’t much manage by the end. The character of Thaddeus is so fun to watch that one is let down when his ingenuity takes a backseat to the uninspired maneuverings of Barkley. The film seems to hurry too fast to wind itself up and much of the early glamor and speed is washed away.
No comments:
Post a Comment