 |
Bob, a disgruntled office nebbish, loads his revolver every afternoon in preparation for the rampage he never goes on. One fateful day, he drops a bullet; while on the ground retrieving it, another disgruntled office nebbish goes on a shooting spree of his own. After plugging the other guy, Bob becomes a local hero and the big boss promotes him to a cushy position previously held by a girl taken down by the more successful rampager. But she's not dead, she's just paralyzed, and as payback for not letting the gunman finish her off, she makes a deal with Bob to help her commit suicide by subway train. However, he loses his nerve at the last second, and ultimately she falls for him. Or does she? Or did any of this actually happen?
This movie doesn't work, but it's a fairly intriguing failure nonetheless. Since watching it, I've tried to think of some element I can point to and say, "Aha! There's the problem." But I don't think it comes down to one false filmmaker's move; rather, He Was a Quiet Man dies from a thousand small cuts. I will now list the four that bleed most profusely.
First: weird-ass CGI. Bob's insanity — oh, spoiler alert, maybe — is indicated in part by his fish tank, which is filled with sarcastic, talking, computer-animated ichthyoids. A lot of background elements are CGI as well — cars, planes, exploding buildings — but whether that was a stylistic shoice or one dictated by budget is hard to say.
Second: sloppy editing. The timing's all wrong, which strangles most of the jokes. For you Kevin Smith-watchers out there, this is why Dogma wasn't very good.
Third: strange, alien dialogue. Nobody sounds like a human being; I'd quote a representative line to you, but every one spoken sounds like the work of a tin-eared screenwriter. That, or it's a function of the...
Fourth: goofy twist ending. The film's final thirty or forty seconds plays like a cocktail of The Village, Fight Club and that most venerable and least respectable narrative technique, it-was-all-a-dream. What aggravates is that it almost works; the movie drops just enough clues throughout the runtime to integrate the twist, such as it is, with the protagonist's personality, but with too little confidence.
Bits of bizarre humor get successfully pulled off — Bob's encounter with a freakish janitor, for instance, or how his old parking space is marked "MISC." — but they're the exceptions. The ingredients for a delightful black comedy are all present, it's just that somebody sneezed while it was rising in the oven. I'd bet folding money the picture could be much improved with another trip to the cutting room; an accomplished editor could pull a real Brown Bunny on it.
Let me say I'm glad to live in a world where the likes of Christian Slater can be a movie star. (Jordan, Jesse, Go! made a similar point not long ago about Nicolas Cage and Paul Giamatti; what an age, when wierdos are routinely given top billing.) Here's a guy who was all but biologically engineered to be a teen star of the late 80s and early 90s, except now it's 2008 and he's still hanging around. It's good to see him making the character shift from brash teenagers and brash nuclear weapon-protecting guys to hair-trigger gangster nuts (as in Anthony Hopkins' Slipstream released the same year as Quiet Man) and hunched, beaten-down paper-pushers. Not that his project-picking skill couldn't use some polish: this movie was probably a gamble worth taking, but Alone in the Dark? Mindhunters? This from the man who knew to Gleam the Cube lo those many years ago.
- Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
- Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
- Béla Tarr's The Man from London
- Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
- Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
- Anton Corbijn's Control
- Jeffrey Blitz's Rocket Science
- Robinson Devor's Zoo
- Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
- Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
- Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
- Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
- Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding
- Jason Reitman's Juno
- Tamara Jenkins' The Savages
- David Fincher's Zodiac
- Matthew Ogens' Confessions of a Superhero
- David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
- Greg Mottola's Superbad
- Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That
- Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
- Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening
- Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
- Anthony Hopkins' Slipstream
- Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth
- Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
- Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth
- Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
- David Silverman's The Simpsons Movi
- Frank Cappello's He Was a Quiet Man
- J.A. Bayona's The Orphanage
The rank might be misleading; this is still a more interesting movie than several of the ones ranked above it; in fact, I'd probably re-watch it before I'd re-watch most of the films on the list.
Comments