My Blind Brother (2016)

29 Wednesday Mar 2017

Tags

Adam Scott, Blind man, Brothers, Comedy, Drama, Jenny Slate, Nick Kroll, Review, Romantic comedy, Sophie Goodhart

D: Sophie Goodhart / 85m

Cast: Adam Scott, Nick Kroll, Jenny Slate, Zoe Kazan, Charlie Hewson

Robbie (Scott) is blind. His brother, Bill (Kroll), is not. Robbie is an athlete who regularly takes part in sponsored sporting events such as marathons in order to raise money for charity (and hey, if it gets him a little press or TV attention, that’s okay, isn’t it?). Bill is the manager of a small printing firm who regularly finds himself helping Robbie with his training, and taking part in each sponsored sporting event. Does he want to? Well, yes and no. Bill loves his brother, but deep down he wants to be free to live his own life and not defer so much of it to Robbie. This makes him feel guilty, which in turn pushes him to help his brother, which in turn makes him want to feel free to live his own life, which in turn makes him feel guilty, etc. etc.

It doesn’t help matters that Robbie is a bit of a jerk, one who never credits Bill for the help and support he provides, and who rarely acknowledges that he even needs any help in the first place. Living in Robbie’s shadow for so long – Robbie has been blind ever since a childhood accident – Bill has become aimless, self-deprecating, and bored. So when he meets Rose (Slate) at the wake for her boyfriend (who was knocked down and killed by a bus while having an argument with her), Bill’s emotional guilt over Robbie is matched by Rose’s feelings of guilt over her boyfriend. They find they have lots of things in common, and later on that same evening, they sleep together.

But in the morning, Rose has second thoughts about seeing Bill again, and tells him so. Upset and humiliated, Bill tries to forget about her, but he finds that he can’t. Meanwhile, Robbie announces his latest plan to swim across a local lake, but Bill stands his ground and refuses to take part. Robbie continues with the plan and finds a volunteer willing to help him train, and be in the boat that guides him across the lake. Of course, the volunteer is Rose, and when Bill finds out she’s helping his brother, he begins to take more of an active role in Robbie’s training. This leads to some unexpected complications (unexpected except in romantic comedies such as this one), as Bill realises he’s in love with Rose, Rose develops feelings for Robbie, and after not too long, Robbie takes it for granted that Rose and he are a couple. As the day of the swim approaches, the relationships of all three are tested, and certain revelations muddy the waters enough so that on the day, nothing goes quite as planned.

Early on in My Blind Brother, Bill reveals to Rose how much he doesn’t like Robbie, and that he sometimes wishes him harm. Later, we see him leave open a kitchen cupboard in order for Robbie to walk into it face first. It’s darker moments like these that make the movie a little more interesting than you’d expect given its low-budget indie roots and general indie demeanour. But My Blind Brother does its best not to be so predictable, and even though the outcome can be guessed before you even sit down to watch the movie, there’s still enough there in the run-up to keep audiences involved and amused. This is thanks mostly to Scott’s performance as Robbie, whose narcissistic, self-centred, arrogant tendencies mark him out as a rare creature of little depth or self-awareness. At a restaurant, he criticises another disabled man for being too noisy, and makes no apology for it. The message is clear: his disability is more “important” than anyone else’s.

By making Robbie such a jerk, writer/director Goodhart – here expanding on her original 2003 short of the same name – allows the movie to retain a dramatic sensibility amidst the more standard rom-com tropes. As well, Bill is a bit of a maladjusted schlepp, the antithesis of Robbie’s hard-line positivity, a guy whose one ambition is to spend lots of time watching TV. When he discovers that this is one of Rose’s favourite pastimes, his face lights up with the unexpected joy of finding a kindred spirit. It’s no wonder he falls in love with her: she’s as unhappy as he is. But whereas Bill would be happy to wallow on his couch for the rest of his life, Rose at least wants to do something, even if she’s not sure what that something is. Thus her involvement with Robbie leads Bill to regain some of his self-respect, and shed the ennui that’s been holding him back.

These themes are spread throughout the script, and given equal screen time with the more comedic moments, such as the one pictured above, where Bill and Rose have been interrupted having sex by Robbie, and have to put their clothes back on without him realising what’s going on. Goodhart’s direction is so good in this scene. It’s not just the physical awkwardness of the moment, but the expressions on the faces of both Bill and Rose that makes the scene so funny. They barely have to say a word, and that’s what makes it so effective. Elsewhere there’s plenty of mileage to be made from Robbie’s overwhelming self-belief, whether he’s driving a car, jumping into a swimming pool, or patronising female reporters, and Bill’s perplexed looks when things don’t go his way.

The romantic elements are handled well, and though viewers won’t find anything new on offer, it’s the quality of the performances and the sharpness of Goodhart’s script that makes up for any failings in the material. Scott’s portrayal of Robbie is often harsh and uncompromising; he’s like the pantomime villain everyone wants to boo and hiss. Kroll (the former Bobby Bottleservice) is lovable and sympathetic as Bill, and handles the darker aspects of his character with understated aplomb. Slate, an actress who impresses with each role she takes, and who was especially effective in Obvious Child (2014), brings an off-kilter sincerity to her role that helps define the character and her quirky understanding of personal responsibility. There are good supporting turns too from Kazan as Rose’s roommate, Francie, and Hewson as Bill’s blind, stoner friend, GT, while the script balances the light and shade of Robbie and Bill’s relationship with a good deal of appealing charm.

Watching My Blind Brother is one of those movie experiences where you think you know exactly what’s going to happen and how, but again, Goodhart’s script is much better than the basic storyline suggests, and though it ends exactly as it should, its caustic approach to the combative nature of Robbie and Bill’s relationship (exacerbated by Rose’s involvement with them both) elevates the material and aids the movie in avoiding being too lightweight or frivolous by comparison. If Robbie’s “advanced spatial awareness” means he moves around or picks things up a little too easily, then that’s a small quibble to make, but overall this is an enjoyable mix of the conventional and the unconventional that is well worth checking out.

Rating: 7/10 – a winning combination of comedy and drama that is easy to like and which is unafraid to try a slightly different approach to its basic rom-com storyline, My Blind Brother has an agreeableness to it that helps it stand out from the crowd; likely to be overlooked amongst all the other rom-coms that get released these days, it would be a shame if it failed completely to attract an audience, or missed out on the attention it deserves.

Welcome to the World of High Concept/Low Return – Don’t Breathe (2016) and The Shallows (2016)

18 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Action, Blake Lively, Blind man, Drama, Dylan Minnette, Fede Alvarez, Home invasion, Horror, Jane Levy, Jaume Collet-Serra, Medical student, Mexico, Murder, Review, Robbery, Seagull, Shark, Stephen Lang, Surfing, Thriller

Don’t Breathe (2016) / D: Fede Alvarez / 89m

Cast: Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, Stephen Lang, Daniel Zovatto, Franciska Töröcsik

You can hear the pitch even now: “What if these thieves tried to steal a lot of money from someone, and that someone was blind and he trapped them in his house and turned the tables on them?” A grateful production executive greenlights the project in seconds, and sometime later, the finished project is hitting screens with all the fanfare required of an original thriller (Don’t Breathe is being advertised and touted as a horror movie. It’s not; but more of that later.)

However, the grateful production executive clearly abdicated any responsibility for the project once he gave it the go-ahead. If he hadn’t, then maybe he could have insisted that the basic storyline, the marginally interesting characters, and the increasingly silly narrative be better developed before filming began. Sadly, it wasn’t, and the intriguing pitch that started everything off goes nowhere fast before throwing itself head first into the Comedy Zone in its last twenty minutes.

Every year the critics – and audiences – latch on to a movie they believe is a cut above the rest when it comes to other thrillers/horror movies/comedies etc. Don’t Breathe is one such movie, but as it does so little to justify its elevated importance, it’s tempting to wonder if the critics – and audiences – have seen a completely different cut of the movie; and if they have, why aren’t we allowed to see it? The basic premise is somewhat intriguing – three delinquents, Rocky, Alex and Money (Levy, Minnette, Zovatto), decide to go for broke on their next robbery/home invasion, but come up against a blind man whose resourcefulness (and unnerving ability to be in the wrong place at the right time) puts them in a life or (mostly) death situation.

Alvarez is a rising star in the horror firmament, and his remake of Evil Dead (2013) was better than expected. But here he’s in classic thriller territory, with a group of “innocents” being pursued by a relentless killer (Lang’s preternatural blind man), and finding themselves pushed beyond their limits. And though Alvarez is undoubtedly talented, here it’s obvious that he doesn’t have any answers when a script breaks its own rules – repeatedly. The blind man is referred to as an Army veteran, and because he’s played by Lang, we know he’s going to be a hard man to beat. But where a blind person’s other senses are often enhanced, here they come and go on a whim and a prayer. One minute he can hear extremely well, enough to pinpoint someone’s position in a ventilation system, the next he can’t hear a heavily wounded Minnette sneak up on him.

The problem with Don’t Breathe is that it wants to be a thrill ride with bloody (but non-horror) moments, but it forgets to add the thrills. A string of attempts to escape the house are repeatedly set up for Rocky and Alex to fail (Money exits stage left early on), and the plot’s major “twist” seems at first to be “great”, but it’s more of a way to keep the plot from collapsing in on itself (and pad out what would otherwise be a pretty meagre running time). In the end, the script, by Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues, runs out of steam and values unfortunate laughs over the muted tension it’s achieved earlier on. And as for the coda, well, let’s just say that clumsy is as clumsy does, and the end of the movie is very, very clumsy indeed.

Rating: 5/10 – with no one to care about or root for, Don’t Breathe becomes an exercise in soulless thriller tropes that let’s down the viewer continually once the blind man makes his presence felt; notwithstanding an eerie sequence in the basement when the lights go out, and some excellent production design, the movie will have long-standing fans of the sub-genre yawning at the absurdity and hamfisted nature of it all.

The Shallows (2016) / D: Jaume Collet-Serra / 86m

Cast: Blake Lively, Óscar Jaenada, Angelo José Lozano Corzo, José Manuel Trujillo Salas, Brett Cullen, Sedona Legge, Diego Espejel

As with Don’t Breathe, you can hear the pitch just as clearly: “What if a surfer, a lone woman even, gets trapped on a rock two hundred yards from land, but can’t get there because there’s a huge great shark stopping her?” And once again, a grateful production executive greenlights the project in seconds, and sometime later, the finished project is hitting screens with all the fanfare required of an original thriller. And yet…

The problem with The Shallows, however, is that, like Don’t Breathe, you don’t get a chance to really care about the main character, Nancy (Lively). We get to spend an awful lot of time with her, and while her predicament is scary enough on its own, it isn’t really enough in general terms for it all to work as well and as harmoniously as it would like. We get some back story – Nancy’s making a pilgrimage to the beach her mother, who has died recently, fell in love with twenty-five years before – but it’s very perfunctory and serves to pad out the script at the movie’s beginning. Then we have an extended section that shows just how good a surfer Blake Lively’s stunt double is, before Nancy’s leg gets chomped on and she makes it to the rock (along with an injured seagull).

And then the movie does something unforgivable: it makes Nancy’s predicament boring to watch. As if realising that having its heroine stranded on a rock with nowhere to go isn’t quite as cinematic as it hoped, the movie brings in a drunken Mexican (and brings back two surfers from earlier on), and serves them up to the shark as a way of re-engaging the audience’s interest (the drunkard’s death is particularly nonsensical, and any viewer who doesn’t hang their head in despair at the way in which he goes to his death, should give up now if they think it makes any sense whatsoever). Then it’s full speed ahead to the final showdown, Nancy vs shark, and the kind of over the top outcome that provokes laughter instead of relief.

After a string of uneven yet mostly effective thrillers starring Liam Neeson – Unknown (2011), Non-Stop (2014), Run All Night (2015) – Collet-Serra seems unable to do anything positive with Anthony Jaswinski’s tension-free script. From the decision to shoot most of the movie against a green screen (making most shots and scenes look false and oddly lit), to failing to address issues of continuity (how do the two surfers fail to see the drunkard’s remains on the beach when they come back?), Collet-Serra allows the fractured narrative to play out with barely an attempt at tightening things up, or avoiding treating the viewer like a numpty (sure, you can “stitch” a bite wound with just a couple of pieces of jewellery and not bleed out – no problem).

As the injured yet resourceful Nancy, Lively is a good enough actress that she can overcome some of the more bizarre decisions her character makes – resetting a seagull’s dislocated wing, anyone? – but for most of the time she’s either yelling in pain or shouting for help. Some of the earlier scenes are geared around showing off her figure, and there’s a particularly gratuitous surfboard-cam cleavage shot that adds nothing to the sequence it appears in, but as the movie progresses she keeps covered up and her predicament is kept to the fore – until the end when she’s required to strip back down to her bikini. We may be in the twenty-first century but in certain regards, it seems, the times they aren’t a-changin’ (or are ever likely to).

Rating: 4/10 – a thriller that plays out by the odd numbers alone, The Shallows does everything it can to fall short of expectations and commitment; with its unhappy use of CGI, and an overbearing score courtesy of Marco Beltrami, it’s a movie that brings apathy and indifference to the table in ever increasing portions.