The keys are in the car.

Blue Ruin

(2013)

(SPOILERS) If Jeremy Saulnier’s gripping, low-key revenge thriller is guilty of anything, it’s underplaying. That’s not so much a criticism as an attempt to explain why it might not have found the widest of audiences. From it’s measured, assured unfolding to muted lead character, Blue Ruin is a finely crafter slow-burn suspenser.

It’s also pretty much an anti-revenge flick. Vigilante justice is dispensed by one wholly ill-equipped for it, but so ravaged by the effects of loss upon his psyche that he is compelled to act. There is no uplift or catharsis resulting from the actions of Dwight (Macon Blair). The murder of his parents has left him an unkempt drifter, living off the map in the car that was the scene of the crime (and the blue ruin of the title). On learning of the release from prison of Wade Cleland, the man convicted of their murder, Dwight confronts and stabs him to death in a club toilet.

That isn’t the end of the matter, as the rest of the Cleland clan vow revenge. This brings Dwight’s sister and her family into danger, and Dwight is forced to continue the escalating blood feud.

It wouldn’t take much to tell this story in a very different way. Indeed, such films are rife, with much more classically heroic, impassioned protagonists. Saulnier is careful to snatch such comfort away from the viewer. We spend the entire movie in the company of Dwight, but he remains an enigmatic figure. Introverted, dishevelled and unaccustomed to talking to others, he’s the most unlikely seeker of retribution conceivable. He has no real skills for his self-appointed task, other than a determination to end the reprisals. He gets lucky with his initial assault, but further encounters show him to be woefully out of his depth.

Dwight makes frequent and fundamental errors, shining a flashlight around in a darkened house, stealing a gun with a clamp on it, unsuccessfully attempting a DIY repair of an arrow wound, and completely failing to dispatch one of the Clelands in his trunk (“Fish in a barrel” mocks his prisoner, “You missed from two yards?” comments Ben). Most significantly, Dwight initiates a wave of violence through being misinformed. Wade took the rap for his dying father so, even if the family are entirely culpable of many and varied crimes, there’s no one left to account for this particular one.

The comments of his sister (Amy Hargreaves) are especially resonant. She may be pleased when she hears Wade is dead, but when her family is threatened she is less sympathetic to her brother (“I’d forgive you if you were crazy. But you’re not, you’re weak”). The implication is clear; Dwight lacks the strength to carry on with his life. He has been stuck in the same space for nigh-on two decades, and it has blinded him. His recognition of the full tragedy comes in his conversation with the remaining Clelands during the bloody final scene; “You know what’s awful? Just cos my dad loved your mom, we all end up dead”. The only hope is that his half-brother (the fruit of the union between his pa and the Cleland ma), who shot but didn’t want to kill Dwight and flees the scene leaving his gun behind, has ended the cycle.

Dwight’s personality isn’t laid out on a plate, but that makes him a much more fascinating character. Our first sighting is of man gone to seed, dilapidated and hirsute, but a shave and haircut reveals a small bookish fellow. He’s quietly methodical, emphasised by the rigorous order with which he cleans up after himself. If he lacks the traits of the classical hero, and if his sister has something in her comments, Dwight is armed with the admirable trait of stoicism in the face of a certain demise.

He is also characterised by sadness rather than righteous fury, the final confrontation emphasising his regretfulness rather than malice or hatred. The Clelands, in contrast, are a particularly loathsome, irredeemable bunch. Had Saulnier chosen to emphasise this aspect he could easily have turned this into a victory over those who “had it coming”.

Besides Blair, who has something of Paul Giamatti but understated, the most memorable turn comes from Devin Ratray as Ben, an old school friend and veteran. His career stretches back to Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and beyond, but he was most recently notable in Nebraska. His particular (legally rigorous but morally flexible) code (“I had to wait for him to aim before I could shoot”) emphasises a rich vein of subdued humour throughout, from Dwight having to escape in the car whose tyre he just slashed to his pathetic, little boy confession at the emergency room (“I had an accident on my leg”) and his trunk prisoner’s offer of help when Dwight says he will not let him out until he is armed (“I can get you a gun!”)

Saulnier has made a great little thriller, but one that requires perseverance. There’s minimal dialogue during the first half hour (a third of the picture’s concise running time) and he maintains the subdued aspect of his protagonist throughout. It will be interesting to see if his follow up, Green Room, sustains the quality on show here.

Comments

He’s probably paranoid, high-strung, doesn’t like daylight. You know, has a lot of crumbs in his beard, if he has a beard.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) (SPOILERS) I’d like to report I had a blast with Godzilla vs. Kong . It’s lighter on its oversized, city-stomping feet than its slog of a MonsterVerse predecessor, Godzilla: King of the Monsters , and there are flashes of visual inspiration along with several engaging core ideas (which, to be fair, the series had already laid the seeds for). But this sequel still stumbles in its chief task: assembling an engaging, lively story that successfully integrates both tiny humans and towering titans.

It's Dark Age, by Jupiter!

The Dig (2021) (SPOILERS) An account of the greatest archaeological find Britain would know until Professor Horner opened the barrow at Devil’s End. And should you scoff at such “ fiction ”, that’s nothing on this adaptation of John Preston’s 2007 novel concerning the Sutton Hoo excavations of the late 1930s. The Dig , as is the onus of any compelling fictional account, takes liberties with the source material, but the erring from the straight and narrow in this case is less an issue than the shift in focus from characters and elements successfully established during the first hour.

You stink, my friend.

Mulan (2020) (SPOILERS) Let that be a lesson to Disney. It’s a fool’s errand to try and beat the Chinese at their own game, no matter how painstakingly respectful – or rather, pandering – you are. Indeed, Mulan ’s abysmal $40m box office take in the country – where it did get a proper release, so no plandemic excuses can be cited – feels like a direct rebuke; don’t try and tell us how to suck eggs. There’s an additional explanation too, of course. That Mulan sucks.

Our "Bullshit!" team has unearthed spectacular new evidence, which suggests, that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, the Loch Ness Monster.

Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) Cheeseburger Film Sandwich . Apparently, that’s what the French call Amazon Women on the Moon . Except that it probably sounds a little more elegant, since they’d be saying it in French (I hope so, anyway). Given the title, it should be no surprise that it is regarded as a sequel to Kentucky Fried Movie . Which, in some respects, it is. John Landis originally planned to direct the whole of Amazon Women himself, but brought in other directors due to scheduling issues. The finished film is as much of a mess as Kentucky Fried Movie , arrayed with more miss sketches than hit ones, although it’s decidedly less crude and haphazard than the earlier picture. Some have attempted to reclaim Amazon Women as a dazzling satire on TV’s takeover of our lives, but that’s stretching it. There is a fair bit of satire in there, but the filmmakers were just trying to be funny; there’s no polemic or express commentary. But even on such moderate t

Roswell was a smokescreen, we've had a half a dozen better salvage operations.

The X-Files 1.24: The Erlenmeyer Flask The Erlenmeyer Flask makes for a fast-paced, tense and eventful ride, but does it make any sense? That less than mattered at the time, but revisiting the mythology arc (for probably the fourth or fifth time) reveals increasingly tenuous internal coherence as the various conspiracy elements begin to pile up and the situations become ever-more convoluted. This will become the Chris Carter’s signature: don’t examine the details too closely, go with the flow. Trust Chris implicitly.

UFO IN MOSSINGHAM?

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2020) (SPOILERS) One might reasonably suggest the recourse of the ailing or desperate franchise is to resort, seemingly out of nowhere, to space aliens. Even Police Academy didn’t go that far (to Moscow, yes, but not to space). Perhaps animators think kids have no skills of discernment and will swallow any old sugar-coated crap. Perhaps they don’t, and they will. Ice Age had been enjoying absurd success until Collision Course sent Scrat spinning into the cosmos and grosses tumbled. Shaun the Sheep has been around for a quarter of a century, but this is only his second movie outing and already he’s pulling an E.T. on us. Of course, this may all be part of the grand scheme, and Nick Park is simply doing his bit to familiarise the tots in time for Project Blue Beam.

Wow. Asteroids are made of farts. Okay. I got it.

Greenland (2020) (SPOILERS) Global terror porn for overpopulation adherents as Gerard Butler and his family do their darnedest to reach the safety of a bunker in the titular country in the face of an imminent comet impact. Basically, what if 2012 were played straight? These things come to test cinemas in cycles, of course. Sean Connery struggled with a duff rug and a stack of mud in Meteor , while Deep Impact plumbed for another dread comet and Armageddon an asteroid. The former, owing to the combined forces of Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, was a – relatively – more meditative fare. The latter was directed by Michael Bay. And then there’s Roland Emmerich, who having hoisted a big freeze on us in The Day After Tomorrow then wreaked a relatively original source of devastation in the form of 2012 ’s overheating Earth’s core. Greenland , meanwhile, is pretty much what you’d expect from the director of Angel Has Fallen .

Careful how much boat you’re eating.

Onward (2020) (SPOILERS) Pixar’s Bright , or thereabouts. The interesting thing – perhaps the only interesting thing – about Onward is that it’s almost indiscernible from a DreamWorks Animation effort, where once they cocked a snook at such cheap-seats fare, seeing themselves as better class of animation house altogether. Just about everything in Onward is shamelessly derivative, from the Harry Potter /fantasy genre cash-in to the use of the standard Pixar formula whereby any scenario remotely eccentric or exotic is buried beneath the banal signifiers of modern society: because anything you can imagine must be dragged down to tangible everyday reference points or kids won’t be able to assimilate it. And then there’s the choice of lead voices, in-Disney star-slaves Chris Pratt and Tom Holland.

By heaven, I’d thrash the life out of you… if I didn’t have to read the Nine O’Clock News.

The Green Man (1956) (SPOILERS) The Green movie from Launder and Gilliat starring Alastair Sim that isn’t Green for Danger. Which is to say, The Green Man can’t quite scale the heady heights of that decade-earlier murder mystery triumph, but neither is it any slouch. Sim is the antagonist this time – albeit a very affable, Sim-ish one – and his sometime protégée, a young George Cole, the hero. If the plot is entirely absurd, Robert Day’s movie wastes no time probing such insufficiencies, ensuring it is very funny, lively and beautifully performed.

Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the gentleman guppy.

Waterworld (1995) (SPOILERS) The production and budgetary woes of “ Kevin’s Gate ” will forever overshadow the movie’s content (and while it may have been the most expensive movie ever to that point – adjusted for inflation, it seems only Cleopatra came close – it has since turned a profit). However, should you somehow manage to avoid the distraction of those legendary problems, the real qualitative concerns are sure to come sailing over the cognitive horizon eventually; Waterworld is just so damned derivative. It’s a seafaring Mad Max. Peter Rader, who first came up with the idea in 1986, admitted as much. David Twohy, who later came aboard, also cited Mad Max 2 ; that kind of rip-off aspect – Jaws birthing Piranha – makes it unsurprising Waterworld was once under consideration by Roger Corman (he couldn’t cost it cheaply enough). Ultimately, there’s never a sufficient sense the movie has managed to become its own thing. Which is a bummer, because it’s frequently quite good fun.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog