NEW RELEASES - October 7, 2008 

  The Devil's Chair (Dir. Adam Mason, 2006)

While exploring the spooky ruins of an old mental asylum, punk rock turk Nick West (Revolver's Andrew Howard, too tough for eyebrows) & his hot, but fussy, girlfriend dose on blotter acid & he rolls around on the floor masturbating while she's eaten alive by a bone-encrusted electric chair. After spending four years in a hospital for the criminally insane for the girl's murder, Nick is pretty much ready to admit he may have hallucinated the whole thing & killed the girl himself when he's released into the custody of pony-tailed mad psychiatrist Dr. Willard (David Gant) and his team of research assistants who plan to find out the truth about this killer chair. The assistants, sadly including Matt Barry from BBC classics Garth Merenghi's Darkplace & The Mighty Boosh, are wisely frightened that Nick might slaughter them while they sleep, but Doc Willard seems to actually believe in this murderous furniture. It seems the old asylum was run by an equally mad psychiatrist back in the '50s who attempted to "treat" his unhinged patients by placing them in the blood-triggered chair, actually "a portal to another realm that can separate the soul from the body." One by one, of course, the assistants find reasons to sit in the devil's chair & are summarily sent to a bizarro asylum with slimey maggot phones, a skinned man in a plastic trash bag & a black-cowled demon with a horse-skull for a head, who rises from the floor in a cloud of buzzing flies.

If this all sounds patently ridiculous, have no fear. The Devil's Chair calls bullshit on itself in the last 30 minutes & goes all post-modern on us, transforming a ludicrous mash-up of Hellraiser (which it name-checks), The Legend of Hell House & Stuart Gordon's brilliant From Beyond (1986) into an equally absurd "commentary" on the horror genre. Condemning the banality of its own narrative would be cool if The Devil's Chair offered up anything of value to take its place, some reason to have indulged these blood-drenched meta-monkeyshines for so long. The last reel turnabout might have been chillingly effective if it didn't also obliterate the entire reason these characters are gathered in the evil asylum to begin with. It is a bit of a relief when all the crummy narration, random changing of camera filters, insistent freeze frames & blatant continuity errors give way to a grim, gruesome realism, but writer/director Mason is so bent on blowing our minds that he forgets to connect all the plot threads before he shouts "Voila!" & pulls the curtain back on a dodgy mess. When Nick finally mocks us for craving the torture porn of Saw, the grisly & moralistic mumblety-peg of slasher films & the CGI-overkill which prevents a truly visceral response to filmed horror, by quoting Johnny Rotten's famed kiss-off, "Do you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" we really, really do & that may not be quite what the filmmakers were after.

You Don't Mess With the Zohan (Dir. Dennis Dugan)

For those who think everything Judd Apatow dips his 5000 fingers into will be transformed into comedy gold, his co-writer credit on this anemic Adam Sandler vehicle may cause some consternation (as will Robert Smigel's). We'll forgive Celtic Pride (1996) as being the folly of youth & Fun with Dick & Jane (2005) because every director apparently has to be saddled with Jim Carrey at least once, possibly as a kind of Hollywood initiation rite. The truly talented are given the handicap of a Jim Carrey star-turn, the hacks get Robin Williams.

If hearing words like "baba ghannouj," "tahini" & "hummus" coughed up in thick cartoonish middle-eastern accents reduces you to paroxysms of laughter, Don't Mess with the Zohan is your movie. Superhuman Israeli terrorist hunter Zohan (Sandler), thought killed by Palestinian baddie The Phantom (a seriously slumming John Turturro), seizes the opportunity for a sabbatical & high-tails it to New York City to fulfill his secret dream of becoming a hairdresser. Several "Faigelah" jokes later, he's spinning a styling chair in a down-at-heel salon managed by Dalia (Entourage's Emmanuelle Chriqui), a Palestinian. Having only seen the Paul Mitchell hair style catalogue from 1982, he's a hit with older women who still think feathering & frosting is the bee's knees. It doesn't hurt that he also has sex with them in the back room. Zohan doesn't care, he's full service. Of course, this being a low-end Middle Eastern neighborhood on the verge of gentrification & Zohan being a bit of a superstar in his home country, his past comes back to haunt him & us, mostly in the form of sight gags only a Wayans brother could love & a few esoteric ethnic jokes spread sorely thin over the course of a LONG two hours. Despite most everyone involved being either Jewish or Arab, Don't Mess with the Zohan is probably racist to boot, but if you've got the free time to figure out just how, you should probably just finish that Doctoral Thesis applying the Hegelian triangle to Gilligan's Island & make something of your life.

As usual Sandler has assembled a dizzying array of cameos, as if frittering away the talent of others somehow speaks to Sandler's largesse as an entertainer. Zohan features Henry Winkler as the vomiting limo passenger, Kevin Nealon threatening to crap his pants, John McEnroe & Kevin James discussing McEnroe's propensity for rage,  boxing announcer & "Let's Get Ready to Rumble" phrase-owner Michael Buffer as a Trump-esque real estate developer, Mariah Carey & her cleavage, Dave Matthews who I wouldn't recognize if he sat on my lap singing "Crash Into Me," Lainie Kazan as the neighbor lady Zohan does doggy-style in front of her son, Chris Rock as a cab driver, Rob Schneider as the former terrorist whose pet goat Zohan heartlessly kidnapped, George Takei & Bruce Vilanch as two gay guys sitting on a couch & well-respected Israeli actress Dina Doron as Zohan's mother. Apparently Dom DeLuise is also a part of this low-brow menagerie, but I didn't spot his particular teeth marks on any of the scenery.

Zohan's length is the real deal-breaker here. Had this been a 90-minute movie, one could conceivably surrender to its giddy charms -- John Turturro training for his hacky sack bout with Zohan by cracking two eggs into a pint glass & drinking down two live chicks, Israeli-owned duty-free electronics stores actually named Going Out of Business & Everything Must Go, a game of hacky sack played with a live cat, Zohan's unique take on cutting children's hair, amazing Pleistocene Catskills comic Shelley Berman stealing every scene he's in as Zohan's fodder, etc. -- but that final, interminable half-hour completely eclipses these meager bright spots.

The Happening (Dir. M. Night Shyamalan)

 
Significantly less gimmicky than other Shyamalan products, The Happening, amazingly, doesn't fall prey to the director's usual cinematic miscalculations. The uncomfortable mix of Rod Serling & Deepak Chopra, wherein the films set out to chill or horrify & then either weave off hazily into New Age hokum, or attempt the kind of "twist" ending that affords enormous pleasure in short episodes of Twilight Zone or Night Gallery, but elicits mostly groans from even mildly attentive moviegoers.

As always, Shyamalan excels at the set-up. One not-so-special afternoon random citizens begin walking backward, talking nonsense & then killing themselves with whatever's handy. Policemen shoot themselves with their firearms which are then picked up by passing strangers who do the same, landscapers lie down in front of their riding lawnmowers, construction workers step, without a moment's hesitation, off of high-rise scaffoldings into oblivion & joggers cut their throats with broken glass. All of these suicides are filmed with an absolutely unique mix of gore & grace. There's pure, though admittedly grim, poetry in watching those workers fall from the sky still in mid-step, in the gradually revealed sight of hanged men & women dangling from the swaying branches above a scenic New England country road. Of course, the civil authorities, pundits & newscasters attribute this lemming-like behavior to germ warfare, the act of terrorists.

The actual, fleshed-out characters in The Happening, however, are more problematic. We're first introduced to science teacher Eliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) as he's delivering a portentuous speech to his class concerning the disappearance of bees. In the wake of the mass suicides school is dismissed & Wahlberg makes plans with co-worker John Leguizamo to head to a haven in rural Pennsylvania until the crisis blows over. Leguizamo collects his little girl, Wahlberg his wife (Zooey Deschanel) & they head for the hills, which proves to be exactly the wrong place to head. Although the Eco-dread subtext isn't underlined in fire & brimstone just yet, it's pretty easy to predict what's coming. To Shyamalan's credit, he doesn't wield the truth like a novelty cashew can loaded with springs. Pretty much every character realizes the ecological implications simultaneously & then they spend the rest of the movie dealing with the crisis instead of playing dumb for the sake of unnecessary narrative jolts.

Wahlberg's Eliot is just about as annoying as most high school science teachers who aren't completely defeated by the public school system & Wahlberg reads every line as if he's teaching a dog to read a wristwatch. Really, he's the Dudley Do-Right scientist from every 1950s sci-fi movie given some light-weight psychological baggage so we don't go and mistake him for Jon Agar. This psychological baggage comes in the form of his wife, Alma. Figuring out what the hell's up with Deschanel's character often threatens to become more interesting than what's making people blow their brains out for no reason. Is she a little, um, "special"? Is she a nymphomaniac? Is she a child-like sexpot like Carroll Baker in Elia Kazan's potboiler Baby Doll (1956)?

Come to think of it, most of the characters in The Happening are true oddities, types from sci-fi B movies made somehow ethereal by Tak Fujimoto's effectively pellucid color palette & that strange meditative tone Shyamalan enforces even when he's ratcheting up tension or cautiously reveling in gore like the genre director almost every sane person wishes he'd become already. There's some real, gleefully morbid wit on display here, something we haven't seen in the director's films since 2000's severely underrated Unbreakable. I mean, what's to be made of the character who first posits the Eco-Rapture theory, a loopy gentleman farmer who talks to grass & won't stop rhapsodizing over how much he loves hot dogs, of Wahlberg trying to reason with a plastic potted plant, of Deschanel suggesting -- somewhat timidly -- that her family doesn't deserve the apocalypse because they're "not assholes,"  of Wahlberg singing a verse of the Doobie Brothers' "Black Water" to some paranoid backwoods types in order to prove he's normal...of old women in WWI gas masks knitting away & watching TV in a Victorian parlour? Best of all, a superbly photographed scene in which Wahlberg & Deschanel realize that trusting a tree to safely suspend a tree swing may not be the best idea, under the circumstances. The Happening is littered with great imagery, with inexplicable characterizations that serve to keep us off balance in what is, essentially, just a fun science fiction film, for once not completely sabotaged by Shyamalan's often squishy spirituality. 

Hell on Wheels (Dir. Bob Ray, 2007)

Austin filmmaker Bob Ray's documentary about the shaky ascent of this city's nationally-emulated Roller Derby teams isn't nearly as exploitative as the A & E cable network's popular reality show Rollergirls (2006), which covers similar territory & features many of the same players, but it's not as much fun either. Hell on Wheels sums up the history of the sport from 1936 to its cultural fade-out in the mid-1970s with a short fake newsreel & then homes in on Austin where, in 2001, Tulsa emigrant, ballsy uberflake Dan Policarpo assembled four lovely tattooed punk hellions at Casino El Camino on 6th Street and, by all accounts, birthed a new wild & woolly brand of roller derby. It didn't take long for the four ambitious, but woefully inexperienced, girls to slough off Policarpo -- whose vision of the league included "bears on fire on unicycles & clowns stabbing each other" -- and form Bad Girl Good Woman Productions which set off a revolution amongst similarly-inclined punk rock Amazons across the country.

But whereas conflicts in A & E's Rollergirls were presented mostly as semi-orchestrated catfights, the trials & tribulations on display in Hell on Wheels are all too real & as heart-breaking as any bittersweet love story. As a microcosmic view of U.S. labor struggles & corporate wrangling, it would be hard to find a more succinct object lesson in blind ambition, labor inequity & unrest, the hubris of management & power in numbers without consulting classic docs like Barbara Kopple's Harlan County U.S.A (1976). & American Dream (1990), films notoriously devoid of tattooed sex kittens pummeling one another into submission while rollerskating. As the schism widens between the original four founders, who refuse to surrender any real power to the rank & file, and the majority of the atheletes, who express valid concerns over safety issues & the way in which the league's profits are spent, Hell on Wheels becomes absolutely riveting. Hearing terms like "transitional leadership" casually bandied about & watching the bloodless coup unfold with almost historical inevitability is downright chilling, especially amongst people who've probably never studied Marx or Machiavelli. By comparison, the footage of actual Roller Derby bouts seems a little uninvolving. Like NASCAR, perhaps, Roller Derby just doesn't translate well to short snippets of film; it needs to be experienced live where the energy of the crowd, the effect of Lone Star beer, the pounding of the skates on the roller rink floor (or banked wooden track) & the garage rock'n'roll create bruising, utterly hypnotic pop culture mayhem.

Although the split which created the two rival Austin leagues (banked-track team, Lonestar Rollergirls & flat-track team, Texas Rollergirls -- both still thriving) wasn't the end of the world, in the narrative arc of the documentary something seems irreparably compromised, if not lost, by film's end -- the belief that sisterhood trumps economics possibly, youthful idealism certainly. As a sports documentary, Hell on Wheels may fall short, but as a bracing cautionary tale, it's hard to beat. 

Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead (Dir. Louis Morneau)

Completely selling out John Dahl & J. J. Abrams' truly creepy original, sequel slut Morneau (Hitcher 2, Carnosaur 2) has no feeling whatsoever for the ominous, cold chromium impassivity of semi trucks on lonely desert highways, instead introducing us to a quartet of mostly disposable characters & disposing of them with zero ingenuity, running them through one pointless test after another. Adding insult to injury, our roadtrippers' solutions to these tests are actually more insane than the sadistic demands that inspire them.

Supernatural's Nicki Aycox & her square-jawed -- oh, let's face it, he's square every which way -- fiance (Beverly Hills Chihuahua's Nick Zano) are heading to Las Vegas for a unisex bachelor/bachelorette party, with Nicki's wild, annoying sister (Rebecca Davis) in tow. On the way Davis picks up Nick (Kyle Schmid from The Sisterhood of Traveling Pants & History of Violence), a guy from Salt Lake City she met on Myspace. Nick tells them he's a "third wave emo punk," and he's so annoying that if he were impaled onto a Peterbilt mitred exhaust stack BEFORE the movie started it wouldn't be quick enough. Instead he basically becomes the film's lead male character, information that might require a Spoiler Alert if there were anything here that wasn't already spoiled at conception.

Of course the travellers' station wagon breaks down and, while walking to the nearest town for help, they come across the kind of isolated house that one viewing of Texas Chainsaw Massacre should steer you away from. No one's home so Nick smashes a picture window, which prompts ol' square jaw to break the front door off its hinges. Leaving the door hanging open & the window uncovered, our heroes leave an apologetic note, steal a classic muscle car from the garage & tool off down the road. After this, you pretty much excuse psycho trucker Rusty Nail's first two murders as justifiable homicide.

There are a few good B-movie lines embedded in Joy Ride 2 & I'll just tell you what they are so you don't feel you're missing anything essential. At one point a trucker who thinks Nicki's coming onto him to "close them pretty eyes & pretend I'm Kenny Chesney for all I care." He also refers to a girl's large breasts as "circus boobs," which only gets points because it's more clever than anything else in the moribund script. Also worth some notice is the effective, suitably ragged performance by Nicki Aycox. Nobody's acting career survives Joy Ride 2 unscathed, but hers comes the closest.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Dir. Mick Jackson)

Drearily filmed on video in Hallmark Hall of Fame soft focus, this turgid soap opera makes most Lifetime network movies seem like Douglas Sirk films by comparison. Happy couple Dermot Mulroney & Gretchen Mol give birth to two giant babies smeared with strawberry Smucker's one stormy winter night. When one is born with Down Syndrome, Bone Doctor Mulroney (not a euphemism) insists Nurse Emily Watson take the child to a Dickensian home for the infirm on the edge of town & he tells Mother Mol the baby died. This gothic orphanage is actually fairly interesting filmically, so Nurse Watson flees with the baby immediately only to be stranded in the blizzard on a deserted rural road. After watching Joy Ride 2, I just assume the trucker who rescues her is a psychotic killer, but, unfortunately, it's not that kind of movie. Instead she falls in love with the guy, who whisks she & the child off to Pittsburgh.

There's a moment just after Mol gives birth where I was hoping the Bone Doctor was going to gaslight her, fill her full of drugs post-partum & tell her she actually mis-remembered how many children she had. But it isn't, unfortunately, that kind of movie either. Because Bone Doctor Mulroney saw how the death of a child destroyed his mother long ago, he justifies his lie by telling himself the child won't live long. He warns Nurse Watson that "No one raises Mongoloids on their own." Of course, in trying not to devastate Mother Mol he actually turns their marriage into one long, guilty funeral. It doesn't help that Nurse Watson keeps sending him Polaroids of the child growing up. The couple become distant from one another (I think, at one point, they say they haven't had sex in six years...) & Bone Doc Mulroney's shame spiral becomes a living heck. Oh secrets -- you can't live with 'em & you can't mount a crap movie without them. Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh, Nurse Watson has become a Down Syndrome rights advocate & grandstands in courtrooms & grocery store aisles all over the rust belt.

Though The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a period piece, it's hard to tell exactly what period we're in. Some time between 1950 & 1972 I'd imagine, but there's not a lot of directorial or production design conviction where dates are concerned. It's a shoddy & manipulative movie, to say the least, and the score is enough to put you off piano & cello for life. Truly unwatchable.

Normal (Dir. Carl Bessai, 2007)

Normal is yet nother study of intertwining characters dealing with grave personal loss, only this one foregoes piano & cello for synthesizers & video soft-focus for medium-budget production values. Carrie-Ann Moss (Disturbia, The Matrix) is the focal point here, as Catherine, a woman who wilfully refuses to go on with life after the death of her sports hero son, Nick, in a drunk driving accident. Moss has been driven to polishing off a couple of bottles of red wine a day, incessant cleaning, vegetarianism & collecting enough canned goods for the coming endtimes. She has nothing but cranky disregard for her other son & barely concealed loathing for her husband, who's chosen to go on living the best he can. Others caught in the vortex of this tragedy include creative writing teacher Walt (Battlestar Galactica's Callum Keith Rennie), the drunk driver who killed Nick, Nick's autistic/agoraphobic brother Tim (indie staple Benjamin Ratner) who was in the car at the time & Jordie (Jane Austen Book Club's Kevin Zegers), Nick's best friend who was just released from a reformatory for stealing the car in which the boy was killed. As the movie opens, Walt's wife leaves him & he dives headfirst into his mid-life crisis, bedding a comely TV weather girl who also happens to be one of his students. Jordie, fresh from the reformatory with a One Tree Hill-size chip on his shoulder, comes home to find his father married to a friend of his older sister's.

The sexual tension between Jordie & his stepmother is immediate & he sits at his desk masturbating to a Union Jack commemorative plate to relieve the stress. Tim spends his days writing letters to female convicts & memorizing TV weather reports delivered by...guess who? Yes, we're all mysteriously linked. Hollywood likes to tell us that. In fact, Hollywood won't rest until we all know how connected we are to everyone else, how one person's grief is tantamount to our own, how one person's happiness should be muted by the misery of others. Hollywood wants us to know that if one person is damaged, we're all damaged. Go Hollywood. The problem is, aside from the creative writing teacher's wife (who has the good sense to flee this miasma)  & Jordie the Innocent, most of these folks are deeply unlikable terminal cases & we're forced into close proximity with them for so long that their little stabs at redemption seem like so much hogwash. Moss'  Catherine is a completely unreasonable woman, constantly criticizing her husband for wanting to move forward, angrily refusing to eat any of the food at what seems like a perfectly friendly backyard barbecue and, in what passes for a redemptive moment at the end of the movie, telling her other son Brady (Juno's Cameron Bright), "You're all I've got now." Thanks, mom.

There's a sour sameness to the adult male characters here. Bessai is known for directing films that feature complicated, often difficult, women (Lola, Unnatrual & Accidental) & he has a real feel for them, but it took me well into the movie to realize that the same scruffy, greying, Teutonic middle-aged man wasn't playing at least three separate parts. The men just seem to be sleepwalking which, I suppose, is the point, but it doesn't make these characterizations stick with you.

All in all, this is depressing, drowsy stuff, occasionally invigorated by steamy sex scenes, one of which is so bizarre & disturbing you'll probably need to turn off the movie & take a quick bath to recover your sense of decency. And boy does Normal drag. Even at the hour mark you'll feel as if someone's been slapping you in the face for several days straight. This is a world where no one gets over anything, all physical love is misguided & where blind rage is always percolating beneath the surface of human interaction, where, if you're already damaged, chances are you'll only become moreso as time passes. In other words it's a lot like real life & that, ladies & gentlemen, is why National Treasure: Book of Secrets raked in $124 million in its first 10 days.

Pink Eye (Dir. James Tucker)

Pink Eye begins as a disturbing, wildly inventive, cheapo horror film, performing miracles with an amateur cast, a few evocative locations & video FX thought played out in 1990. Infernal lighting, expressionistic gore & creepy found documentary footage from mental hospitals manage to make the meager budget an actual asset, an idea that's great in theory but rarely in practice.

The story revolves around a series of murders & suicides at a rundown nuthouse. Although we're never actually told what's happening in the hospital, there are theories that a couple of doctors are doing PCP testing on the patients, including the very creepy, almost Lynchian, Edgar (so-called because he quotes from Poe a little too often), a kind of Dr. Phibes who wears elbow-length rubber gloves & a really creepy mask that looks as if it's been formed from a splat of novelty dog poop. There's also a parallel love story of sorts about a long-distance relationship & the very strange bad dreams the separation causes. When these stories begin to meet up, there's a sense of dread hanging over the proceedings that most mainstream filmmakers can't muster with big budgets & A-list stars. Unfortunately, not a single thread of this movie leads the viewer anywhere. The Pink Eye reference, mentioned in a dream & tangentially referred to in the film's garishly violent prologue, is dropped entirely, what's happening to the patients at the asylum is never explained & a whole slew of promising characters seem to fall off the face of the earth. It's as if the director promised all his friends they could be hacked to death on film if they'd each give him $100. What we're left with is the Poe-spouting ghoul Edgar, rampaging through the countryside killing people. While that sounds exciting, Edgar's spree is actually an unwelcome & rather ho-hum diversion from the main plotline, which turns out not to have been a line at all, just a frayed end that goes nowhere. Sad, because all the elements were in place for a low-budget horror classic.

Ripple Effect (Philippe Caland, 2007)

Yet MORE lives intersecting at the crossroads of misery & tragedy! In this case they're not intertwining or intersecting though, they're, um, rippling. Here's a movie so averse to action that the pivotal car accident is only heard beneath the opening credits. Fasion designer Amer Atrash (Director Philippe Caland), who's wearing Nicholas Cage's Bruckheimer hair, is gearing up for a huge partnership between his small boutique company & a huge conglomerate that will allow his exotic, middle-eastern line to be distributed worldwide. When the deal falls through, Atrash's life, understandably, unravels & while he frantically attempts to salvage his life's work his needy, tranquilized wife Sherry (a really out-of-it Virginia Madsen) takes his child & leaves him. She's real philosophical about it though, so it doesn't appear as if she's being a selfish, self-involved ass, which she is. Where the audience is concerned it's all for the best, though -- no more laudanum-slow shots of Amer & Sherry padding about their Turkish rugshop of a mansion in long flowing robes like the wan ghosts of Mick Jagger & Anita Pallenberg in Nicholas Roeg's Performance (1970).

Probably because he's gone quite mad, Amer decides mid-film that the reason for his current run of bad luck must be the hit & run he perpetrated years earlier. While driving around a swamp, for reasons known only to Philippe Caland, the screenwriter, Amer hit a black man who leaped in front of his car. For fear of being deported, the designer crouched in the bushes, made sure the injured party was taken care of & fled the scene. Now, Amer reasons unreasonably, if he faces up to his actions, he can reclaim his career, wife, child & his rugshop of a mansion. Amer soon finds his paraplegic victim Philip (Forest Whitaker) at a bar where he's listening to his grammatically challenged folksinger wife Kitty (Minnie Driver, singing lines like "into the void where we begun..."). Because Whitaker doesn't have much going on south of the border, the two are in an open marriage & Kitty immediately wants to jump in the sack with Amen while Philip reads New Age philosophy books in the next room. Amen declines. Apparently there are limits to all this intersecting.

Since being paralyzed, Philip has become a kind of New Age guru, preaching the unique belief that, subconsciously, mothers cause their children to die of SIDS. Simply put, through worrying their child may die of SIDS, they subconsciously cause the child's demise. So that's why bad things happen to good people. The second half of the film is just Whitaker spouting rheumy platitudes (think Dr. Phil without the humor) while Amer looks up at him gratefully, tears rolling down his face. I'm fairly sure there's some kind of pseudo-religious agenda at work here, something specific & a little creepy, but I'll be damned if I can figure out which Topanga Canyon cult sponsored The Ripple Effect. I looked inside the DVD case for a helpful pamphlet, maybe something featuring a swastika with a peace sign in the middle or a dove perched on each of its stern right angles, but obviously some curiosity seeker had removed it. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I think there's something afoul with this movie & it's not just the scene where Driver, enraged at Philip's kindness to Amer, unleashes her wifely venom, changing accents every other word. At least that was entertaining.

The Visitor (Thomas McCarthy, 2007)

Not the informative menstrual documentary I hoped it would be, Thomas McCarthy's (The Station Agent) movie is actually a well-done post 9/11 character study. And while it does constitute a trifecta here in the lives intertwined by misery sweepstakes, it's heads & tails above The Ripple Effect & Normal. Which is good, because I was about to make a hasty proclamation that any movie without a gun, a midget or both,would not see the inside of my DVD player.

Starring the always great Richard Jenkins (Six Feet Under, Burn After Reading), The Visitor is the story of emotionally shut-down college economics professor & widower, Walter Vale, whose life goes pleasantly haywire when he finds a couple living in his spare New York City apartment. The young couple, a proper Senegalese muslim woman, Zainab (Ghost Town's Danai Gurira), and a Syrian Afro-beat drummer, Terek (Haaz Sleiman of TV's 24), are victims of a sublet scam & have nowhere else to go. Walter's every word & mannerism are carefully designed to curtail actual discussion & Jenkins registers both permission & reluctance, preference & distaste, with either an insincere rictus of a smile, or a dour, funereal countenance. It's with a combination of these two expressions that he agrees to let the couple stay with him for a few days. Walter isn't a lost cause by any means & that keeps The Visitor from becoming too morose. He's actually trying, he simply doesn't have the knack for it yet. Perhaps because his wife was a classical pianist, Walter has some idea that music may be the salve he requires, and he's transfixed by the sight of Terek playing his African drums. When Terek informs Walter that the key to playing the drums is to "stop thinking," the button-down professor knows it's the instrument for him. The two become friends, though Zainab remains wary of Walter's intentions.

Then, while attempting to squeeze his drum through a subway turnstile, it appears Terek didn't pay his token & the police descend on him. Really the token isn't he issue, his race is. Terek is taken into custody & it's discovered that he's an illegal immigrant. By now Walter is neck-deep in the lives around him & way out of his comfort zone. While Terek is "detained" in a huge anonymous beige warehouse in Queens, Walter finds him a lawyer, visits him daily with letters from Zainab, practices drumming & eventually takes in Terek's mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass), with whom he develops a romantic relationship. Jenkins is just terrific here. The way he politely turns his head while holding Terek's personal letters up to the glass in the visiting room, the way his kindness & sadness seem to come from the same well, the way he peers over his glasses a little too long when he's at a loss for words or actions -- it's a great performance & the rest of the cast rises effortlessly to the occasion, especially Gurira whose hilariously reactions to Walter's social ineptitude enliven many of the scenes. The Visitor thrives on clashing tones -- the jazz bar vs. the stultifying ecomics conference, Fela Kuti fading into Chopin on the soundtrack, the colorful outdoor market where Zainab sells her jewelry & the antiseptic lobby of the detention center -- and these contrasts keep it from ever becoming dull. Without overselling the misery,  this movie brilliantly captures the isolationist tenor of our times. Highly Recommended. 

All Reviews by Charles Lieurance