Who’s In It: Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald
The Basics: Sam Rockwell is a colonial theme park employee and not-exactly-recovering sex addict (he leaves meetings for restroom nookie with the woman he’s sponsoring) whose mother, Anjelica Huston, is in an institution. To pay for her room and board he fakes choking on food in restaurants and then wrangles money out of the people who “save” him. Excellent already, right? Can’t screw up a nasty arrangement of plot directions like that, can you? Well…
What’s the Deal: Oh wait, you can. You can explain the whole film for the audience and spell it out over and over that what’s really wrong with our anti-hero is that he just wants to be loved and cared for, making every single maladjusted action he perpetrates really just a plea for affection even though it’s all twisted and genital and corrupt. He simply has to learn how to be a better man blah-blah-etc-lessons-blah. Couldn’t we just find out that he’s been punching himself in the face the entire time instead?
Who Almost Makes It Worth Watching: Sam Rockwell, an actor who’s learned a really good lesson in his own life, and that’s that being a leading man is a trap to be avoided. So he gets to star in somewhat smaller, ostensibly weirder movies like this and live a little bit outside the Hollywood box. And here you see him be as fully committed to the non-committal material as much as a person can be. It’s like you can see on his face that he’d like it to be even darker and dirtier. Admirable.
Second Worst Thing of All: Messy, flat, ooh-we-are-so-naughty titillation that’s nowhere near as incendiary as it thinks it is. Because guess what, movie? Unless you’re full of actors who are really and truly having sex on screen and going their merry fornicating way like the people in Shortbus (or any number of recent French films, or Pink Flamingos or some of Warhol’s early movies) then you’re not that nervy at all.
Worst Thing of All: Voiceover narration. In terms of annoyance, this device is second only to main characters breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience. It’s cheap, it’s lazy, it’s usually inconsistently administered and it almost always tries to smooth over the parts of the movie that the script and director couldn’t get right. To say that at least it’s better voiceover narration than Nicolas Cage’s in Bangkok Dangerous is as much as I’m willing to concede.