Wave of Mutilation

As much as I’d like it to be, this is not a post about the Pixies, but that doesn’t mean it has absolutely nothing to do with them. I bring them up here at the start because their music, much like that fantastic cover of the Carpenters classic, tends to be a little bit on the dark – some would even say depressive – side of things. But there is almost always also a point to their lyrics, a reason for the malaise and ennui, and like all great musicians their work goes deeper then just being able to play well and craft a catchy tune.

Movies can sometimes be a lot like Pixie lyrics. Films like Babel or In the Bedroom or Platoon or Leaving Las Vegas can seem pretty grim for most of their running time, but there is a depth and meaning to all the heartbreak and sorrow that resonates so deeply each of those pictures become impossible to forget. Despair and darkness can be a good thing, and as long as there is purpose to the pain I’m all for stories that head straight inside the heart of darkness and holding nothing back.

What I do I have problems with are motion pictures like Downloading Nancy. Technically well made, gorgeously shot by the great Christopher Doyle (resembling a little his dynamic work on Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express) and extremely well acted by its three leads Jason Patric, Rufus Sewell and especially Maria Bello, director Johan Renck’s debut work a piece of straight-up nihilism that’s about as appetizing as mainlining battery acid.



This is a movie obsessed with depression. It is about a self-destructive woman named Nancy (Bello) whose 15-year dysfunctional marriage has driven her right around the bend. Apparently abused as a child, she likes things a bit rough (if you get my meaning), golf-obsessed husband Albert (Sewell) too caught up in his own superficial world to notice his wife is slowly falling to pieces.

Keeping thing simple, she comes to the conclusion that the only way she can be free and happy is to be dead, but she can only experience that if she can find someone to end it all for her in the act of absolute sexual brutality she desperately longs for. Patric is the man on the internet Nancy meets who likes it nearly as rough as she does, while Amy Brenneman also stars as one of the most singularly unhelpful therapists I’ve ever cinematically encountered.

If there were some deeper meaning to Pamela Cuming and Lee Ross’ screenplay (based upon the latter’s original story) I’d be okay with all this masochistic darkness. If I felt like I was learning something deep or meaningful about the human condition, I’d be okay with 100 or so minutes of straight-up despair. Heck, I’d have settled for one of the characters having some sort of emotional recognition that felt genuine or honest, at least then I could try to convince myself in some small way there was some sort of merit to all this depravity.

But nothing like that ever takes place. All this movie wants is to deliver the pain, and it wants to do it in as unsettling a way as possible. This has got to be the singular most uncomforting film I’ve seen all year, and while I appreciate and respect the fact that Bello and Patric were so willing to shed themselves so emotionally (and physically) naked for it that alone does not make watching such an irredeemable crock of hooey even slightly worthwhile.

I have a problem with movies that are all about and for the suffering with no other reason to exist than that. I’m not saying all stories have to have happy endings with rainbows and butterflies and little animated birds chirping brightly, not at all. What I am saying is that there has to be some point to the malaise, some reason for it to matter. After all, viewers are the ones who have to sit there for two hours and absorb it all in, and if your going to spend all that time making us feel like crap you sure as hell better make sure there’s damn good reason.

In other SIFF news, I just noticed that there is ANOTHER mockumentary on the SIFF docket, and like Mothers & Daughters it is a Canadian production. It’s called The Baby Formula and has its first screening on Tuesday. On the plus side, it actually sounds kind of interesting (lesbian couple desperately wanting a child secretly – and separately – go to a doctor and get impregnated with genetically modified ‘female’ sperm made from their own DNA). Maybe I’ll to give it a shot. After all, the Canadians can’t screw up the format twice in the same festival, right?