the Paperboy: (2012. dir: Lee Daniels) In a year crammed with explorations of human cruelty, here instead is an often excruciating plunge into the urge toward slow self-destruction and its favorite mode of expression, fetishistic sexual obsession.
Like Killer Joe, this one softens its brutal edges by placing itself in the midst of the white-trash south. Ostensibly the story of a reporter (Matthew McConaughey, again!) returning to his hometown to reopen an investigation into an old murder conviction, this investigatory framework is so undervalued by the writers that it is left in the end hanging and unconcluded. Instead, the film is really about the magnetism a sociopath exerts on those with a yearning towards self-immolation. John Cusack as the murderous cracker in question has garnered all manner of hard criticism for his performance, but it's a tough role and I think he nailed it just about exactly. Zac Efron (whom I understand has built up a hardcore teen-idol reputation but will always be the young Simon Tam to me) is equally good as the belated innocent taking his baby-steps into the complex and often ugly world of adult sexuality.
These hard-working actors are not given an easy time of it. There is some obvious improvisational chatter which, along with other things, leaves one with a wish for a more disciplined editor, although, truly, I think we can leave the blame for this failure (and it is that, ultimately, despite a lot of hard work from good people) at the director's door, since the editor sometimes does lovely things which save the movie's collective ass. The unrelenting ugliness of the story is ameliorated by a jaunty comic touch in the lighting and the pace, but there are no laughs here, at least not intentional ones. Pete Dexter, who wrote the book and co-wrote the screenplay, is a fine author with a twisted psyche, and things which work on paper don't always project into light with the same clear result. "Art," said Thornton Wilder, "is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time." This movie is a failure because it does not value its own story, but uses it as a flimsy framework to explore those secrets: that dark, amorphous and amoral morass that is human eroticism. Which makes it interesting, certainly, but not a good movie.
*SPOILER ALERT*
White Heat: (2012. dir: John Alexander) Wiltingly overheated but engaging six-hour melodrama about London flat-mates renting from the son of a peer. It's the late sixties, and he's assembled the motley group as a sort of sociological experiment. You can name these characters without knowing anything else about it: there's the black man overcoming racial bias, the gay man overcoming sexual bias, the overweight Catholic girl from Belfast who does the cooking and picking up, the flitty arts student, the socially challenged computer genius destined for wealth once the world catches him up, the young feminist fighting with gender bias, and the druggie aristocrat who wants to be Che Guevara but depends on daddy's money to keep at it.
The cast is enormously likable, and that's the rub, isn't it? that's what keeps you watching. Outside of that attraction, it's by the numbers stuff, really; you can close your eyes and guess the crises, from abortion to AIDS to drugs intervention to the brother in the IRA. It's not American TV, though, and some of the choices are unexpected. Not all the lies come out, for instance: the slate is not entirely clean by the end, as happens in life, but never in American television. There's also a throughline of English politics running on screens and newspapers in the background and sometimes running rampant in the streets which provides shape to the passing decades and context for the changing haircuts and attitudes, and that's appealing.
Here's a thing which irks me, though, a thing you can always count on in television anywhere: the girl who ruins her womb with an abortion grows ever bitterer about her sterility until she accepts a second-best in creating a thriving business, and the feminist who doesn't want to subsume herself in motherhood, does, and when anyone asks, what does she say? (You don't need me to tell you this. There's only one answer any woman in any TV show or movie has ever given to the question.) "It's the best thing that ever happened to me." One day I'm going to hear a woman on television say one of these two things, speaking honestly, and without being written off as a villain or buffoon: "I never regretted not having children," or "I've always regretted having had children." On that day, we will know that we have entered a strange and very brave new world indeed.
Watch it, though, for the amiable cast, and for some interesting editing and dialogue. I watched it for Jeremy Northam as the paternal peer, and was entirely satisfied; he was flawless, as ever.
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