Roy Orbison late in his life recorded a tune with the lyrics "Anything you want, you got it; anything you need, you got it; anything at all
." This came to mind as I was watching the new one from that veteran of "arty" schlock, William Friedkin. It amounts to a two-character stage play, only slightly "opened up" for cinema. Ashley Judd plays Agnes, a barmaid who's been "self-medicating" since the disappearance of her young son about a decade previously. Michael Shannon plays Peter, a drifter who's introduced to Agnes by the latter's apparently only friend, a gorgeous lesbian called R.C. (Ever notice that lesbians in real life never seem quite as cute as those in the movies?) Most of the rest of the movie is about the two of them going crazy together because Agnes will do literally anything to hang on to him. Warning for horror fans: despite the cleverly edited trailer, there are no actual bugs here (that we can see, anyway) (except in a few hallucinatory inserts) and very little gore (one scene will remind you of Nick Nolte performing some home dentistry in "Affliction"). This is more like Friedkin channeling David Lynch and Harold Pinter.
Judd is the chief reason to see this; she's so keenly on the mark (at least until the script asks her to jump off a cliff; more on this below) that after a while I was wishing I could preserve this character for a better flick. Her Agnes has a convincingly worn-around-the-edges look. She reminds me of some women I've known working in factories and whatnot, maybe not the highest IQ but they have "street smarts" and are used to fending for themselves in life, often with minimal assistance (if not abuse) from the husband/boyfriend/significant other(s). Agnes' own "ball and chain" is an ex-con named Jerry who re-appears in her life out of the blue after possibly making a series of prank phone calls to her (exactly who made the calls and why is one of the items never spelled out for us). Harry Connick Jr. is perfect as Jerry with his laid-back menace and tattooed musculature. The scenes with the two of them ring so true that they make the later histrionics with Peter (whom we can spot as a nut before he even opens his mouth; it's always "the quiet guys") seem all the more outlandish in comparison.
Here's why this ultimately doesn't work for me: Judd from "Ruby in Paradise" onwards has always emanated a kind of inner strength and core of common sense, a residual humanity that is what has always attracted me to her. Even in those potboilers from the 1990's and early 2000's she was able to transcend her often two-dimensional character and make you believe the person has existed beyond the confines of the screen. In "Bug" she is asked to betray this quality; while she's a good actress she's not quite good enough to pull this off. It doesn't help that her transition into shared lunacy is handled so jarringly; one moment she's questioning the existence of bugs that only Peter can see, the next she's sharing his hallucination of helicopters shaking the building. We know Agnes is one of the "walking wounded" but there are many such people; they mostly don't "lose it," which is why it's news when one of them does (e.g. that female astronaut). We would have needed to see right from the get-go that Agnes has a few screws loose; if Judd was showing us that, I for one missed it. (If she's as DESPERATELY LONELY as we're asked to believe, why not just let Jerry back into her life? Or why doesn't she just go find a guy, or gal? Oklahoma's not the surface of the moon, believe it or not.) From the moment we see all the fly paper hanging from the ceiling, "Bug" gets ever less buyable (and more derivative). With Peter and Agnes dissolving into a mish-mash of shrieks, screams and self-mutilation, I kept wondering where were the cops with a couple of strait-jackets. Judd's performance comes to remind one of Julianne Moore in "Freedomland": the more she hysterically emotes, the more conscious we are of watching an actress as opposed to a character; "suspension of disbelief" goes out the window. The movie's early naturalistic tone also makes the later plot holes more gaping: Why do we never see Agnes' neighbors getting alarmed (is she the only one living there?); when Jerry arrives with the alleged doctor, where is he biding his time until knocking on the door again after the murder; who ordered the pizza? If it's all just taking place inside someone's head like "Videodrome" or "Identity," what are we left with? I think Friedkin wants to have his cake and eat it too: have us accept it both as externally viewed drama and inner phantasmagoria, but as the late Dwight Macdonald pointed out, "If all the cards are wild, you can't play poker .."
To be fair, there are some nice creepy moments and foreboding atmosphere in the best "X-Files" tradition, in fact this probably would have worked better on the small screen; I wouldn't be surprised to see it available on demand on "FEARnet" in the near future. (Sometimes not having had to pay to see a film frees it up to be more likable .sometimes not.) The handful of actors all rise to the occasion. I liked the suggestion that Peter was acquainted with the late Timothy McVeigh (I won't remind you who that is; it's a shame if I need to) but such references (government conspiracies etc.) would have been more compelling if we'd heard them during Peter's earlier more lucid stage. Still it's nice to see Friedkin this late in the game working so low-budget and "balls to the walls"; I'd rather go see this again than the umpteenth "Spiderman" or "Shrek" or "Pirates" or whatever other pre-fab corporate crap comes down the pike ..
Judd is the chief reason to see this; she's so keenly on the mark (at least until the script asks her to jump off a cliff; more on this below) that after a while I was wishing I could preserve this character for a better flick. Her Agnes has a convincingly worn-around-the-edges look. She reminds me of some women I've known working in factories and whatnot, maybe not the highest IQ but they have "street smarts" and are used to fending for themselves in life, often with minimal assistance (if not abuse) from the husband/boyfriend/significant other(s). Agnes' own "ball and chain" is an ex-con named Jerry who re-appears in her life out of the blue after possibly making a series of prank phone calls to her (exactly who made the calls and why is one of the items never spelled out for us). Harry Connick Jr. is perfect as Jerry with his laid-back menace and tattooed musculature. The scenes with the two of them ring so true that they make the later histrionics with Peter (whom we can spot as a nut before he even opens his mouth; it's always "the quiet guys") seem all the more outlandish in comparison.
Here's why this ultimately doesn't work for me: Judd from "Ruby in Paradise" onwards has always emanated a kind of inner strength and core of common sense, a residual humanity that is what has always attracted me to her. Even in those potboilers from the 1990's and early 2000's she was able to transcend her often two-dimensional character and make you believe the person has existed beyond the confines of the screen. In "Bug" she is asked to betray this quality; while she's a good actress she's not quite good enough to pull this off. It doesn't help that her transition into shared lunacy is handled so jarringly; one moment she's questioning the existence of bugs that only Peter can see, the next she's sharing his hallucination of helicopters shaking the building. We know Agnes is one of the "walking wounded" but there are many such people; they mostly don't "lose it," which is why it's news when one of them does (e.g. that female astronaut). We would have needed to see right from the get-go that Agnes has a few screws loose; if Judd was showing us that, I for one missed it. (If she's as DESPERATELY LONELY as we're asked to believe, why not just let Jerry back into her life? Or why doesn't she just go find a guy, or gal? Oklahoma's not the surface of the moon, believe it or not.) From the moment we see all the fly paper hanging from the ceiling, "Bug" gets ever less buyable (and more derivative). With Peter and Agnes dissolving into a mish-mash of shrieks, screams and self-mutilation, I kept wondering where were the cops with a couple of strait-jackets. Judd's performance comes to remind one of Julianne Moore in "Freedomland": the more she hysterically emotes, the more conscious we are of watching an actress as opposed to a character; "suspension of disbelief" goes out the window. The movie's early naturalistic tone also makes the later plot holes more gaping: Why do we never see Agnes' neighbors getting alarmed (is she the only one living there?); when Jerry arrives with the alleged doctor, where is he biding his time until knocking on the door again after the murder; who ordered the pizza? If it's all just taking place inside someone's head like "Videodrome" or "Identity," what are we left with? I think Friedkin wants to have his cake and eat it too: have us accept it both as externally viewed drama and inner phantasmagoria, but as the late Dwight Macdonald pointed out, "If all the cards are wild, you can't play poker .."
To be fair, there are some nice creepy moments and foreboding atmosphere in the best "X-Files" tradition, in fact this probably would have worked better on the small screen; I wouldn't be surprised to see it available on demand on "FEARnet" in the near future. (Sometimes not having had to pay to see a film frees it up to be more likable .sometimes not.) The handful of actors all rise to the occasion. I liked the suggestion that Peter was acquainted with the late Timothy McVeigh (I won't remind you who that is; it's a shame if I need to) but such references (government conspiracies etc.) would have been more compelling if we'd heard them during Peter's earlier more lucid stage. Still it's nice to see Friedkin this late in the game working so low-budget and "balls to the walls"; I'd rather go see this again than the umpteenth "Spiderman" or "Shrek" or "Pirates" or whatever other pre-fab corporate crap comes down the pike ..