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I WITNESS 2003
Written by Colin Green and Robert Ozn.
Directed by Rowdy Herrington.
Starring Jeff Daniels, James Spader, Clifton Collins Jr., Portia de Rossi, Wade Andrew Williams, Mark Carlton, Carolyn Seymour, Jordi Caballero, Ricardo Alvarez, Andriano Gonzalez, Pablo Conquiero and Wilfredo Da Arce.
I Witness is an overly earnest little film about politics, drugs and mass murder on the U.S./Mexico border. The basic idea of the story isn’t that bad, but it was realized with too many characters, too little mystery and an ending where you can pinpoint the exact moment when these filmmakers decided to stop caring whether the movie made any sense or not.
James Rhodes (Jeff Daniels) is a human rights activist who’s been sent down to observe a vote to unionize at an American-owned chemical company in Tijuana. While he’s there, Rhodes gets involved in the investigation of 27 dead Mexican peasants founds in a drug smuggling tunnel. The authorities want to blame it on a enigmatic drug lord, but Rhodes suspects there’s something else going on. His search for answers is assisted by the prideful Detective Castillo (Clifton Collins Jr.) and his work with the unionization vote is complicated by pretty U.S. trade representative Emily Thomas (Portia de Rossi). There’s also a U.S. State Department official named Douglas Draper (James Spader) who is an old friend of Rhodes. I think Draper was intended to be a significant character in this film, but he really just floats around and gives off that vibe that James Spader gave off when he was thin. As opposed to the vibe Spader has given off since he got fat. There aren’t many actors whose onscreen presence has changed so greatly over the course of their career. I really hope computer technology reaches the point one day where thin Spader from Sex, Lies & Videotape can do a buddy cop movie with fat Spader from Boston Legal.
Anyway…Rhodes just sort of wanders around from place to place, getting abducted by drug gangsters and pointedly NOT having sex with Emily, until a guy on his death bed explains the whole story to him. I don’t want to give away the ending but let me just note, the moment when drug gangsters storm in like the cavalry to rescue Rhodes, even though there’s absolutely no way they could know he needed rescuing and absolutely no reason they should rescue him in the first place, that’s the moment when you know these filmmakers no longer care if I Witness makes any sense.
Honestly, this isn’t a horrendous film. Jeff Daniels is a perfectly acceptable hero, though he does look far too much like Jeff Bridges from the 1976 King Kong remake. The script is making a noble effort at saying something about the complexities of life, death and business on the U.S./Mexico border. I suppose the direction is adequate. A paucity of plot, a phalanx of unnecessary characters and a plethora of poorly written scenes does produce a pedestrianly bad movie.
IGBY GOES DOWN 2002
Written and Directed by Burr Steers.
Starring Keiran Culkin, Ryan Phillippe, Amanda Peet, Jeff Goldblum, Claire Danes, Susan Sarandon, Bill Pullman, Jared Harris, Celia Weston, Cynthia Nixon and Eric Bogosian.
This movie is about a poor little rich boy’s journey from insolent, indifferent loser to a just as insolent but slightly less indifferent loser. Along the way he mainly lounges around, looking forlorn as much more interesting characters rotate around him. Oh, and a couple of beautiful women inexplicably jump his bones while the worst thing that happens to him in this story is that he deservedly gets his ass kicked. Why writer/director Burr Steers thought this guy and this life were worthy of anyone’s attention is beyond me.
Igby (Keiran Culkin) is the youngest son in a New York City family that’s just rich enough to not have to worry about money, but not rich enough to qualify as wealthy in New York. His dad (Bill Pullman) is a schizophrenic. His mom (Susan Sarandon) is a controlling harridan. His brother Oliver (Ryan Phillippe) is much better looking, more successful and more capable. For his part, Igby is a lazy no account who glides through life relying on the resources of others without ever suffering any sort of material hardship. And he’s the “hero” of this film.
After getting kicked out of one too many private schools, Igby takes a summer job working for his godfather DH (Jeff Goldblum). He puts as little effort into that as everything else in his life and winds up running away from all of his minuscule responsibilities to glom onto DH’s girlfriend Rachel (Amanda Peet) and her performance artist lover/friend Russel (Jared Harris). After Rachel starts screwing him for no apparent reason, Igby manages to land another girlfriend in the form of Sookie (Claire Danes). She’s from an upper middle class family of intellectuals, which means she has a certain air of sophistication but still has to work for a living.
Anyway, after screwing Igby for several weeks or perhaps months, Sookie meets his brother Oliver and starts having sex with him after knowing Oliver for a grand total of perhaps 5 hours. Sookie’s explanation for betraying Igby is that she and Oliver are the same age. Throw in Igby’s mom having cancer and Igby eventually becoming the bag man for Russel’s drug dealing and that’s pretty much the whole movie.
The only unabashedly good thing about Igby Goes Down is that Amanda Peet takes her top off. Considering you can probably find those images online after a 10 second web search, that means there’s no reason at all to watch this self involved, badly thought out mess.
Now, Ryan Phillippe does give a pretty good performance as Oliver but it’s a case of a fine actor working at cross purposes to the film he’s in. Oliver is a much more engaging character than Igby. He grew up in the same sort of family dysfunction but came out the other side as something resembling a grown up who’s trying to live something resembling a grown up life. Oliver is screwed up but he’s trying to not let that entirely define him. That’s much more realistic and appealing than Igby, who is basically a young New York City-version of the Bill Murray slacker character from films like Stripes and Meatballs, but not being played for laughs. In many ways, it’s like Igby should be a supporting character in a movie about Oliver.
Igby Goes Down is another example of a filmmaker creating a main character without ever seemingly considering how or why the audience should care about him. I don’t know why anyone watching this film should care whether Igby succeeds or fails, or even care what success or failure for Igby would look like. That lack of connection fatally undermines anything else the movie tries to do.
Not that anything else here is all that good either. There are too many scenes that don’t serve the story, too many times the audience is told things instead of shown them and there’s one too many college rock songs on the soundtrack. The acting is okay, though Keiran Culkin is the least impressive member of the cast, but in the end…Igby Goes Down is one of those bad films that doesn’t even offer anything enjoyable in its own badness. Skip it.
IMAGINARY HEROES 2004
Written and Directed by Dan Harris.
Starring Emile Hirsch, Sigourney Weaver, Jeff Daniels, Michelle Williams, Kip Pardue, Deirdre O’Connell, Ryan Donowho, Suzanne Santo, Jay Paulson and Luke Robertson.
This film is a great example of a storyteller who doesn’t understand the story that he’s telling. I know that sounds like an absurd thing to allege. How can the guy telling the story not understand it? However, it’s the only way I can explain the bizarrely wrong emotional focus and characterizations on display in Imaginary Heroes. Writer/director Dan Harris is like a cook who set out to make an apple pie, yet tried to make it with kumquats and licorice. You might be able to make something oddly tasty out of those ingredients, but not by following an apple pie recipe. This movie has the structure and style of a by-the-numbers tale of 21st century suburban angst stuck in between a beginning which unknowingly negates its own premise and an ending with an escalating series of ridiculous revelations that even Harris can’t keep up with.
Things start out with 17 year old Tim Travis (Emile Hirsch) telling us that his older brother Matt (Kip Pardue) killed himself because he was incredibly great at swimming at the same time he hated swimming more than anything else in the world. Now, I have to confess, this opening with Tim’s narration of images of Matt put me off this film right away, long before any of the other flaws reared their head. I can imagine someone hating the obsessive demands of competitive sports or the pressure of competition. How the hell does anyone hate the act of swimming enough to commit suicide? If you really disliked it that much, you’d stop swimming when you were too young for anyone to know you were any good at it. To say that Matt killed himself because he hated swimming is a ludicrously simplistic description of a much more complex dynamic, and if the point of Tim describing it like that would have been to illustrate how ludicrously simplistic Tim’s thinking or view of the world is…that might have been interesting. Unfortunately, every example of human behavior in this movie is a ludicrously simplistic as Tim’s analysis of his brother offing himself.
Even if I’m overreacting to that, the rest of Imaginary Heroes still isn’t any good. It starts off with suicide and then focuses on the characters least affected by that tragedy. Tim and his mom, Sandy (Sigourney Weaver), go about with their unimaginatively angsty suburban lives and there’s no meaningful connection between anything they do and what happened to Matt. The only one who is affected by it is Tim’s dad, Ben (Jeff Daniels), and he’s a terribly written character who only exists to serve the Almighty Plot Hammer. Ben switches from resentful bastard to fumbling, desperate nice guy to wounded father to suit whatever particular scene Tim and Sandy are in at the moment. In this script, Tim and Sandy are meant to be actual human beings while Ben is never considered as more than a prop.
At least Ben gets a decent amount of screen time servicing Tim and Sandy’s narratives. Tim also has an older sister, Penny (Michelle Williams), and I haven’t the foggiest idea what this character is doing in this movie at all. Her existence has no purpose or function and she contributes nothing to the story. She’s dead weight that should have been cut out of the screenplay very early on in the process and is another glaring example of how filmmakers occasionally need someone to tell them “no”. Penny isn’t nearly as glaring as Jar Jar Binks, but I’d say she’s about a .4 on the Binks scale.
There isn’t much of a plot to Imaginary Heroes. Stuff just happens. Most of it’s boring and I could go on and on about how what isn’t boring doesn’t make any sense. I just want to focus on one big, whanging crazy thing. This is going to spoil a significant aspect of the film, so if you haven’t seen it and ever plan to…stop reading now.
Okay, here it comes. After having some sort of drug addled sex with his best friend Kyle (Ryan Donowho), Tim eventually discovers that Ben, the father who’s never liked him and treated him like crap his whole life, isn’t his biological father. It turns out Sandy had an affair with Kyle’s dad and that’s how she got pregnant with Tim. Now, which of these do you think would be more traumatic?
1. Finding out the son of a bitch who’s made your life miserable isn’t your real father?
2. Finding out you just boinked your half-brother?
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I think the whole “you screwed your half-brother” situation would be a much, much bigger deal. Once the secret of Tim’s parentage is revealed, though, no one and nothing in the movie ever references or even alludes to the whole “sex with your half-brother” thing. There’s a very big fuss made of Ben not being Tim’s real dad, but Tim shtupping a blood relative gets flushed down the memory hole and is never seen or heard from again. Am I wrong about this? Is finding out that you essentially were the product of a sperm donor more disturbing than being told you’ve ignorantly committed incest?
I don’t know what else I can tell you about Imaginary Heroes. The parts of this film that aren’t boring are wildly and weirdly ill considered. Unless you like kumquats and licorice with a nice, flaky crust…don’t bother with this movie. |
