Referential Wrappers for Dummies

Rating: Null/10 (1 March 2001)

Spoilers herein.
I disliked this movie, not because it is intelligent but because it is a sophomoric bleaching of a powerful idea. That idea is that the FORM of the narrative should convey the MEANING of the story. In its simplest forms (Faulkner, Kafka) it deals with madness and what has come to be called the surreal. More subtle exercises in Joyce and Nabokov extend that to an emotional breadth and archetypal depth. But that results in hard work for the reader, so from time to time, lesser novelists recycle the idea at the high school level so that a larger and lazier readership can 'get' it.
Films have a harder time with this problem, because they work with a more constrained imagination, and have a tighter integration with societal semiotics. Still, we have some intelligent work with the idea. Greenaway is my own favorite, who incidentally doesn't shy away from the edge of violence as is done here. (Why? To preserve the comic stance? If so, the filmmaker is unwittingly like the society she portrays.).
One branch of the possibility of such "wrapped" films focuses on the actor, incidentally playing a character. That's the model attempted here. More mainstream recent film examples of how this is managed well are 'Sweet and Lowdown' and 'The Pledge.' The former creates a faux documentary narrator who imagines the subject. In this instance, the central actor pulls all the strings. A similar dynamic occurs with 'Pledge' where the wrapper is within the story (excluding the narrator). Easier to read.
A related problem is that Harron mistakes style in the costumes and actor's bearing for cinematic style. Really thin. This film is as lowbrow as 'Being John Malkovich,' cleverness for dummies. 'Fight Club' was more artful and intelligent, though it wasted its opportunity. The only intriguing element here is the probably unintended notion of Dafoe as an imagined Moriarty. This isn't taken anywhere, but Dafoe does have a haunting presence independent of this simple effort.