(2000. dir: Jon Bokenkamp) This movie is fundamentally flawed, at its core, and then again at nearly every layer up to its skin. The editing is bad, the pacing is off, the music is intrusive and godawful. In other hands, it might have been an interesting psychological thriller. Maybe. But it's another one of those plots predicated on a woman A) dying B) being idealized and C) existing solely to instigate a cycle of violence among men. (See Sand, for instance, which distributes the three conditions among two women, but both exist solely for the one purpose. Or A Crime, in fact, fits the same bill, although it redeems itself through strong direction and by employing a living, flawed, active woman as its main character and internal dynamo.)
The basic premise is this: a woman tells her husband she's been having an affair, but it's over. He storms out of the house, and when he returns, she is dead. After that, the ex-lover and the husband set about trying to kill each other while the cops are after them both.
Much of the dialogue and feeling-tone of the movie (set in Tacoma, in the rain) can be summed up in the statement (I'm paraphrasing, of course) "Women. Can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em. Oh, wait, maybe you can." It's about men being abandoned by women and how they deal with their anger and grieving. That's what it wants to be about, anyway, but instead it pretends to be an action movie, with chase scenes, then fight scenes, then chase scenes, then fight scenes, few of them compellingly captured. It's got a three man cast: Luke Wilson is fully bemused in the nice-guy-in-a-trap role that Edward G. Robinson used to play in the old noirs, Dennis Farina gives a game effort as the private dick he hires to help him, but it always feels like he's a character in a television drama, and Reedus is surprisingly miscast and one-dimensional as the jilted lover of the dead woman.
The role as written calls for a young (or emotionally-stunted, anyway) man who's led an entirely sheltered life, devoting the bulk of it to caring for his damaged brother while working in a bakery. The dead woman is the only adventure he's ever known, and this is the fiery internal furnace which fuels his homicidal rage at her loss. The trouble is, Reedus is too streetwise to come across that way. In order to make it work, we need some of the innocent-Reedus we saw in Six Ways to Sunday or Gossip, and he's just not here. When the husband reads the lover's old diary, the wow-I-got-a-girlfriend entries are absurd coming from the jaded, even world-weary Reedus.
In the end, there's some sweetness to the melancholy, but it's not in the saccharine places the script-writer wanted them, which were at the bus-stop, in the jail visiting room, and in the cemetery. Those are all clumsy and unaffecting. Without giving too much away, the sweetness comes from Reedus' face at the gas station, when the actor's world-surfeited persona finally melds with his character's emotional exhaustion.
Rating: two stars
Reedus Factor: two stars
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