The Paperboy

Plot synopsis:
Anita (Macy Gray), the chain smoking black maid of the Jansen family, recounts to an unseen reporter the events of the summer of 1969, when idealistic reporter Ward Jansen (Matthew McConaughey) came back to his fictional hometown of Lately in Moat County, Florida, to investigate the events surrounding a murder in an effort to exonerate a man on death row, Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack). In 1965, swamp-dwelling alligator hunter and small-time criminal Van Wetter has been jailed for the murder of a violent and unscrupulous local sheriff, Thurmond Call. Four years later, Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), a woman from Mobile, Alabama whom Van Wetter has never met but who has fallen in love with him after exchanging correspondence, is now determined to prove his innocence and have him released so they can marry.
Charlotte requested the help of Ward and his colleague, Englishman Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo), who are both investigative reporters from The Miami Times. Ward's younger brother, Jack Jansen (Zac Efron), is hired as their driver. Ward has mixed feelings about returning home to his estranged father, who runs a local newspaper and distributes The Miami Times in their town. Both Jansen brothers dislike their father's latest girlfriend, Ellen. Jack now works as a paperboy for his father's business after having been expelled from college for vandalism, ending his prospective career as a professional swimmer. His only real friend is Anita, who brought him and Ward up after their mother left them.
The evidence against Van Wetter is inconsistent and Ward and Yardley are confident they can expose Van Wetter as a victim of redneck justice. Meanwhile, Jack has fallen in love with Charlotte, who only desires Van Wetter. During a day at the beach, Jack gets stung by a jellyfish and has a life-threatening allergic reaction. Charlotte saves his life by urinating on him, an embarrassing circumstance that his father promptly exploits for an article on his newspaper. Anita realizes that Jack can never stop thinking of Charlotte as she is his first true love.
Van Wetter is hostile to the reporters at first, and contrary to the romantic portrayal he had painted of himself in his letters to Charlotte, he reveals himself to be a sexist and rude man with anger issues. One day, after finally acquiring some useful information from Van Wetter, the Jansens travel to meet Van Wetter's uncle Tyree. The man is the only one who can corroborate Van Wetter's alibi, since, according to Van Wetter, the two men were stealing sod from a golf course in Ormond Beach the night of the murder. Tyree, who lives in pitiful conditions in the middle of the swamp with his "white trash" family, is initially ill-disposed and wary of admitting his own crime to save his nephew's life, but finally caves in. In the meantime, Yardley and Charlotte have visited the golf course to verify that side of the story; Yardley comes back claiming to have tracked the developer who bought the sod stolen by Hillary and Tyree, but the man only agreed to talk upon the promise to remain anonymous, so Yardley refuses to disclose his name even to Ward. Satisfied with his findings, Yardley goes back to Miami to start writing the article.
Suspicious of Yardley's motives, Ward decides to go check the truth in Ormond Beach himself, with Jack and Charlotte in tow. During the trip, Ward gets drunk, approaches two black men in a bar, and take them to his motel room. During the night, Charlotte wakes up Jack after hearing alarming sound from Ward's room, and the two finds Ward tied up, after being raped and tortured by the two men. As Ward is taken to the hospital, Jack does not resent him for secretly being a homosexual or for being into violent, self-destructive practices, but just for keeping from him this side of his adult life.
While Ward's still in the hospital, Jack goes to Miami to try and convince Yardley not to publish the article in his brother's name without checking all the facts first. During the confrontation, Yardley reveals he's actually an American pretending to be English to escape discrimination. He also reveals he had given Ward sexual favors in the past, which was the beginning of Ward's guilty, self-hating infatuation with black men.
After the article is published, Van Wetter obtains a pardon and is released from prison. He takes Charlotte away to the swamp to live with him. Months later, she is unhappy with the demeaning lifestyle she has to endure, and sends a letter to Jack telling him she now realizes she made a mistake and plans to reunite with him at his father and Ellen's wedding reception. However, Jack only finds out about the letter one month later, at the very day of the wedding, when Anita, who's been fired from the Jansen household, gives the letter to him, revealing Ellen decided to hide it from Jack.
Since Charlotte is not there, a worried Jack leaves the party to go find her, followed by Ward, who has lost an eye due to the incident at Ormond Beach and is now an alcoholic after Yardley left for New York with a deal to write a book on the Van Wetter case. When Jack and Ward confront Van Wetter, Charlotte has already been killed after Van Watter refused to let her leave to attend the wedding. A fight ensues, and Van Wetter kills Ward as well, by slashing his throat with a machete (the same weapon the sheriff was murdered with), but Jack manages to evade Van Wetter by diving into the swamp; the next morning, he retrieves Ward and Charlotte's bodies and leaves on the boat in which they came.
Anita finishes narrating by revealing Van Wetter was later convicted for the murders of Ward and Charlotte and sent to the electric chair, yet the identity of the sheriff's murderer was never ascertained. Jack would later meet his mother at Ward's funeral, but he would never get over Charlotte.

Tags: romantic, dark, murder

Review:
He's quite good here in an ultra adult film, as is everyone else, all playing against type: Kidman as a slut, McConaughey as a sexually troubled man, John Cusack as a backwoods maniac, and Macy Gray as a lovable servant.My wife hated the movie but couldn't take her eyes off of it.
The Paperboy is one of those films that has a fine cast, a director with a track record (Lee Daniels, Oscar nominated for Precious) and an interesting plot, but will be rarely seen and largely forgotten by year's end.
Essentially, The Paperboy is a dialogue-driven film about an idealistic reporter, Ward Jansen (Mathew McConaughey), who returns to his hometown in the backwaters of the red-necked American south to investigate the conviction of a man on death row convicted of murdering a sheriff.
When Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), the infatuated pen-friend of Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack), the murderer in question, approaches Ward for help, he recruits his bother Jack (Zac Efron) and colleague Yardley (David Oyelowo) and sets about investigating ineptitude and corruption surrounding the case.It isn't a pretty story, it doesn't race along at breakneck speed and it isn't a film that haunts the viewer long after the credits have rolled.
Each has secrets or sides to their characters they try to hide and each is capable of damaging another willfully and yielding or ignoring their conscience after the event in their own self-harming manner.Efron shows signs of shaking off his teenybopper roots and it is encouraging to see him take a long and effective step away from such pulp as last year's predictable The Lucky One. At last we see something of a character developing from him, and Jack's relationship with the maid, Anita (Macy Gray), who also narrates much of the story, gives a hint of warmth to an otherwise cold and twisted collection of characters.Both McConaughey and Kidman stepped away from the 'beautiful' roles sometime ago, though there is still a feeling of them playing 'against type' here, which isn't fair as both are very fine actors with some startling performances in recent years.
Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack) is on death row for the crime but the reporter believes he is innocent and drags his younger brother (Zac Efron) and a trashy woman (Nicole Kidman) into things.
The cast features Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey, Nicole Kidman, John Cusack, David Oyelowo, Scott Glenn and Macy Gray all playing against type in unusual roles (for each actor).
I agree with the criticisms but still feel like I have to give it a lot of respect and credit for what it does manage to accomplish.The film revolves around a man named Hillary Van Wetter (Cusack) who's on death row for the murder of a local sheriff in a small Florida town.
The Jansen's maid Anita (Gray) is Jack's only friend and she narrates the story.The movie is sleazy and trashy pulp like the films of yesteryear.
The cast is all fantastic; Cusack is very strange and creepy, McConaughey seems to be playing a character like many others he's done before but he does take a sharp character twist, Efron is good as the shy yet determined heart of the film and Kidman is fantastic as the sex obsessed vixen.
It's not quite as funny or bleak as the similarly southern-fried Killer Joe, but I do believe that The Paperboy has a more humanist agenda than William Friedkin's film, basically emerging on the side of people, broken as they often become.Like Precious, this is a film containing difficult individual scenes, and a troubling ambivalence about whether we're investing in a set of real characters or peering at them through museum glass.
Indeed, this is one of the films strengths as it pulls no punches at being explicit wherever possible, which garnered extremely mixed reviews when it was screened at Cannes last year.The acting pedigree of the film is high with Matthew McConaughey and Zac Effron playing the two brothers, with Nicole Kidman excelling in her role as the troubled Miss Bless.
Zac Efron is decent in his protagonist role, Matthew McConaughey does fairly good work, but the true star is Nicole Kidman.
There are a lot of characters in it, all of them ugly, trashy people and played by the likes of Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey and John Cusack, but I never knew whose story this was or through whose point of view this story was being told.
The film is really more of a character story then it is a southern noir narrative-a coming of age story somehow mixed up with a southern Gothic noir-but the plot is pretty irristiable if you're a fan of films like "Night of The Hunter" or much more on the mark comparison wise "The Gingerbread Man" (a much better film i think this might make an interesting companion piece to sometime down the line) The plot (for those of you who don't already know) essentially is Matthew McConaughey is a reporter who returns home to write a story about a convicted sheriff killer John Cusack--there seems to be a story involving the question of his actual guilt.
When Zach Efron first sets his eyes on her--he falls head over heels in love with her--and things develop somewhat senselessly from there.I just want to state that everyone here is severely miscast with the exception of Macy Gray as the maid to the family the two brothers are from-if you have a film with these actors in it and the most effective performance comes from someone who's not known for being an actor--that's a major sign that something's not working right here.
Its nice that Cusack and Kidman were given the chance to play someone so 180 degrees from their normal screen persona yet neither really seems to impress in their role (Kidman makes the most of her character's trashiness--and there are some turns in the later half that Kidman does her best to sell but the film almost completely lets her down in terms of character development....Cusack however is terrible here--he's supposed to be someone so hard headed and mean but when you first see him on screen you don't see the man the characters are seeing...you see Cusack--i suppose director Lee Daniels was hoping to use Cusack's past screen performances here in order to sucker punch the audience with how much of a brute his character is--but this really only works against the film in that I kept asking myself "Is he supposed to be like some of Cusack's prior characters or is this just something that wasn't intended?") It actually would have made more sense if Cusack and McConaughey had switched roles and Cusack was the embittered reporter and McConaughey had been the southern brute because then at least the casting would have made some sort of sense.
Efron is all right enough but i don't feel he especially offers any insight into what the character might be thinking or feeling--it all seems to be what's on the page in the script, and he's just playing that....but at least he doesn't take you out of the movie--in fact one of the best things I can honestly say about this movie is that nothing really takes you out of the movie--the narrative does a good job of pushing through whatever plot obstacles the writing and performances seem to throw in its way and its that kind of pacing that helps keep the movie nicely watchable even when what your watching doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.The movie is again fairly well paced--and you won't be bored watching what happens--you may have some questions and be rather disappointed where it all ends up--having not read the book i can't say whether or not the ending was effective there, but the ending of this film felt so tacked on and so arbitrary, it was almost as if the screenwriter was just throwing up his hands and saying i guess i have to end this somehow.
The movie is also plot and character and acting aside nicely visualized--Lee Daniels really does a fine job putting a visual stamp on Efron's obsessive lust for Kidman's character and the atmosphere of the southern swamps where Cusack's character lived as an alligator skinner (resulting in a really gross scene where you see an alligator being skinned and its innards fall completely out in complete close-up--its actually kind of awesome) Daniels' seems to be trying to go for a real 70's like atmosphere here style wise--and I would say he pulls it off quite nicely--some of the jittery jump cuts of Kidman or the gauzily lit ways Efron day dreams of Kidman are presented--and the soundtrack is nicely handled too.So when all is said and done you have a halfway watchable movie here, but one that is almost so completely bogged down by plot questions, sketchy characterizations, and some pretty bad casting decisions, that it almost feels like it was trying so hard to impress and be a wonderfully sleazy classic for the ages that they let some of the more important and basic things a movie needs to nail down slide by without checking to see if these movie basics actually work.
This movie has the power to make you feel uncomfortable watching it.In fact all the characters in the movie have an hidden agenda and disturbing behaviours.It reminded me Blue Velvet by David Lynch.The set and the soundtrack are perfect, really recreating the late 60s atmospheres.The characters are excellently played - Nicole Kidman, John Cusack, Macy Gray and Matthew McConaughey especially.I also appreciated the courage of Nicole Kidman and Matthiew McConaughey in taking difficult roles, distant from what their fan base are usually expecting.Highly recommended if you're not easily disturbed..
Zac Efron's 'coming-of-age'movie starts with a brutal killing, develops into a love-triangle-cum-family saga and then, like every other film set in the Everglades, explodes into an orgy of Gothic violence.
I always find movies about the Deep South disturbing because of the racism and the way that people treat each other, which was why I kind of knew what to expect from the film, but I was very surprised with how deep the director went into each characters personalities and he really pushed it to the extreme.
I realised, whilst watching the bonus bits on the DVD, that The Paperboy is a famous book which was why the actors wanted to do the movie, so maybe I should read the book to have a deeper look into each character.Budget: $12.5milliom Worldwide Gross: $1.5million (Deserved much more.)I recommend this movie to people who like there deep dramas set in the Deep South about a man on Death Row. 7/10.
The colored house maid seems the best integrated, though still treated as a servant from time to time, but nevertheless grown in her role as a substitute mother.When a film like this one does not even try to be interesting, with no story whatsoever and a lot of over-acting, I see no purpose in taking the trouble to provide examples of why I hate (nearly) all of it.
The setting is Florida in 1969 in a Podunk town where two brothers Ward Jansen (Matthew McCounaghey) and Jack Jansen (Zac Efron) work in the town's newspaper run by their father (Scott Glenn): Jack is an ex-champion swimmer whose fallen on bad times and Ward is a gay reporter who returns to the town with his boyfriend Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo) to help a trashy woman Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman) who is habituated to distant love affairs with men in the penitentiary to release an innocent prisoner Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack) from jail with whom she exchanges letters, after he was convicted of the killing of a sheriff, and now awaiting his execution.
While the investigation goes on course, the young Jack is hopelessly in love by the much older Charlotte, and nothing is what is seems as things progress between both the panorama of skewed relationships and between the leads found about the night of the sheriff's murder and the alleged criminal alibi.The film takes us through racial epithets, a sadomasochistic sexual encounter between Ward and some black hustlers, a lot of bizarre frank physical behavior and coarse sexual encounters, bigotry/racism, swamp derring-do including the evisceration of an alligator - all of which somehow fit well into the mood that Director Daniels wants to convey his story.
There are exceptional performances from Kidman, Efron (who is developing into a very fine young actor), McCounaghey (in a new type of role for the lady killer), Cusack (believably smarmy and psychotic), and Macy Gray.
We knew what Ward was trying to do, but what we get are sub plots that get in the way of the mission and we are left with a director shocking his audience with a dual masturbation scene in the prison visitor room, slutty behavior of Charlotte (Nicole Kidman), paperboy Jack (Zac Efron) running around in his underwear who is in love with Charlotte, disgusting and sex-crazed obsessive behavior from Hillary, and a shocking secret about Ward.
I also hated the way that the film was narrated in some scenes trying to explain everything to the viewer like if we were stupid and needed everything pointed out at us (yes, we can all understand that Efron's character was in love with Nicole Kidman because of his abandonment issues with his mother, there was no need to tell us that through voice over).
The story is narrated by the house maid, Anita (Macy Gray).The film does succeed in bringing the hot and steamy Florida weather on the screen and only watching the characters move make us feel hot and sweaty as well.
Having never reviewed movies on line before,i felt compelled to try and save some other poor soul from wasting 2 hours of their life.I don't always take on board what reviews say,because everyone's tastes are very different,but usually if you read between the lines,you can form a realistic opinion.My opinion is that this movie is a waste of an evenings movie slot.Considering how many movies are out there,to watch a bad movie,is like going to a restaurant and getting a terrible meal.From the first 5 minutes the movie is rambling and confusing and just gets worse.The dialogue is garbled,the plot is all over the place,it's even hard to understand the narrative,which is helping to explain the plot.Usually i use the rewind button, if i am attempting to understand what has been happening,but after 20 minutes, i was past caring.I only finished the movie,because,like a lot of us,i was waiting for the movie to get better.A movie,ultimately is about entertainment,which is why i gave it a 1.I wasn't entertained on any level.If i went back in time to watch it,i would knock it off after 20 minutes.I know some people won,t agree that this is a bad movie,but don,t say i didn't warn you..
Although the word getting around that this is "that one where Nicole Kidman pisses on Zac Efron" was perhaps an early indication, it is nevertheless fair to say that 'The Paperboy', with its rather innocuous title and its poster headed by popular, bankable stars, is probably not the film you expect.It really isn't!
Co-written and directed by Lee Daniels, who drew a lot of attention with his harrowing sophomore film 'Precious', this is another often tough-to-take story of an investigative journalist, Ward, returning to his Florida hometown to look into the case of a potentially innocent death row inmate.
I'm not sure why the maid is the narrating voice for the story - and it was hard to interpret what her relationship really was with Jack (Zac Ephron).Matthew McConaughy (sp?) was way out of his usual type in this film but for me, it wasn't hard to interpret fairly early on what his 'bent' was.Nicole Kidman is recognizable in the early parts by her particular actions and then when you know, it's obvious.Just compelling..
The Paperboy is a gritty, artistically craft but crude and sometimes deliberately repugnant drama about two brothers (Matthew McConaughey and Zac Efron) who investigate the circumstances surrounding a convicted murderer (John Cusack) based on information provided by a down and out lush (Nicole Kidman).
I don't really even know what the movie was fully about after watching it, I guess the story of Cusack's character and the murders...?
From his highly acclaimed efforts in the 2009 picture 'Precious', you would expect Daniels to uproot something with powerful cinematic efforts, especially for an A-list cast starring Matthew McConaughey, Zac Efron, Nicole Kidman, David Oyelowo, and John Cusask.
His big brother Ward (Matthew McConaughey), an investigative journalist, returns to their small town with his African-American friend (David Oyelowo) to look into the case of Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack), who was convicted of killing a vicious local sheriff.Director Lee Daniels shoots the film in a style that is quite gritty, and more so independently, but in truth could best be described as grubby or even scuzzy.
It begun on a good level, kept its course in a good way then it went all downhill, getting worse each frame, each scene went by.Intriguing and seen before multiple times before, this tells the story of two brothers (Matthew McCounaghey and Zac Efron), who work in the town's newspaper run by their father (Scott Glenn) who are helping a young woman (Nicole Kidman) to release an innocent prisoner (John Cusack) from jail of whom she exchanges letters, after he was convicted of the killing of a sheriff, and now he waits days go by until his execution.
I don't know what it is about The Paperboy, whether it be the performances or the way the film is built and played out, but it is a movie that I thoroughly enjoyed and would watch again multiple times..
Despite several negative criticisms I have read elsewhere, I also liked Charlotte as a movie character and the acting performance of Nichole Kidman..