Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
12/6/08
I'm no actor (although I
was highly acclaimed as Teddy Brewster in our high school production of
Arsenic
& Old Lace), but I assume most would rather play a good scene in
a bad movie than be an unmemorable cog in a good one. At least that's
how I assume many a Film Festival Special like Nobel Son is able
to assemble a cast deep with familiar faces in the service of a truly wobbly
story. Son, a comic thriller about kidnapping, cannibalism
and the Nobel Prize, gives its' talented actors loads of cool stuff to
do. That it often contradicts what the other actors are coolly doing
or seems pointless in retrospect presumably mattered not to them while
they were enjoying a week or two on the set plying their thespian trade.
And all that cool business does keep Nobel Son interesting through
a couple of storytelling false starts until it settles into a cold blooded
climax designed to appeal to people you don't want to mess with.
Eli Michaelson (Alan Rickman)
is a movie college professor, so it comes as no surprise that he's a pompous
ass. He's also a genius, and a Nobel Prize win for a 30 year-old
physics discovery surprises no one, least of all Eli. He's to be
accompanied to Sweden for the ceremony by his Forensic Pathologist wife
Sarah (Mary Steenburgen) and slacker son Barkley (Bryan Greenburg), who's
writing a Master's thesis on cannibalism. The night before the flight,
he finally screws up the courage to talk to the demented but smokin' hot
poet City Hall (Eliza Dushku), who gives him a ride to her place after
his bike is stolen. She's plenty weird, but they strike sparks, and
Barkley finds himself scurrying the next morning to get home in time to
catch that flight. He arrives just after Eli and Sarah head for the
airport and is knocked out and abducted by Thaddeus James (Shawn Hatosy),
who claims that Eli's “discovery” was stolen from his father, except that
even that's not quite true because he's really the product of an affair
between his mother and Eli. Seeking vengeance for his non-father's
suicide because of his real father's actions, Thaddeus mails a severed
thumb to the Michaelsons in Sweden, demanding the $2,000,000.00 Nobel cash
prize as ransom. Agent Max Mariner (Bill Pullman), who not so secretly
loves Sarah, handles the investigation, but before long Thaddeus gets away
with the money and leaves the badly beaten Barkley for the FBI to find.
But yet, there's more to it than that, especially when upstairs tenant
Gastner (Danny DeVito) turns up dead, freeing the room above the Michaelsons
for Thaddeus James and his girlfriend City Hall to move in.
Befitting a movie designed
more for stargazing than storytelling, Nobel Son works best on a
scene-by-scene basis, but the overall “What's going on here?” flow is interesting
for more than 2/3 of its' length until the characters the movie deems wronged
decide to turn the tables on the “bad guys”. Other than poor Mr.
Gastner and maybe Agent Mariner, just about everybody who appears onscreen
is some kind of creep, so the ferocity with which revenge is exacted in
the end kinda sucks the air out of what had been as light on its' feet
as a movie that opens with a graphic amputation of a man's thumb can be.
There's barely a moment when someone doesn't turn out to be putting on
a show for someone else's benefit, but the movie gets the purpose of such
a structure backwards: ordinarily, we're to think back over those
past scenes and think “Wow, that's much cooler now that I know what was
really going on!” Instead, Nobel Son's deceptions have a way
of negating the things about the characters that were initially interesting.
This is particularly true of the early scenes between Barkley and City,
which crackle with the random strangeness of her demented worldview, except
that in the end all that strangeness turns out to have a purpose in Thaddeus's
plan, even though we're still supposed to think she's bonkers. Perhaps
if the series of double and triple crosses director Randall Miller and
his co-writer Jody Savin devised were more clever, it wouldn't matter,
but instead they keep cutting the movie's dramatic threads (the horror
of Randall's captivity, the speed and success with which Thaddeus bonds
with his real father after worming his way into the household) off at the
knees just when they're getting interesting.
As I mentioned, it's easy
to see why so many talented actors were interested in playing these characters.
Rickman doesn't have the best material, but he lives large in the role
and gets all the laughs he can with his odious character. Steenburgen
rarely gets to play anything as dark as she does here, while Pullman works
very hard to provide “regular guy” comic contrast to all the strange goings-on
around him. Although the movie's never really sure who City Hall
is, Dushku does a wonderful job playing her, and her scene with Pullman
absolutely crackles. DeVito gets to do some new things as a “recovering
obsessive compulsive” while Hatosy is splendidly crazy as the kidnapper
who always seems to be sincere no matter what his ever-shifting plan is
at the moment. Barkley is a hard, hard role because the movie asks
us to think of him as our hero even though he's mostly just moping in his
father's shadow, and the cannibalism thing is one of those lame indie character
traits that probably plays a lot better in the director's head. Given
all that Greenburg does the best he can, striking sparks with Dushku and
generating a lot of empathy early in his captivity. He's also good
when the Hitchkockian noose starts to tighten after Thaddeus moves in upstairs:
he could end the charade with a single word, but by then he's already in
too deep. But there's nothing he can do with some extreme character
reversals in the final scenes (is this REALLY the guy who kept using the
same complimentary cup day after day at the coffee shop in his first scene?),
and his cannibal-themed closing narration is dreadful.
Nobel Son is entertaining
enough for most of its' length and contains its' share of memorable scenes.
Anyone attending as a devoted fan of any of its' cast members is likely
to go home happy because they've all got good stuff to do. And I'm
sure it was a fun movie to make. But when the end credits start rolling,
what we've seen just doesn't amount to much. No prizes for that. |
