AMERICAN PERFEKT (1997)
"All over America, sane people doing insane things."
2.5 out of ****
Starring Robert Forster, Fairuza Balk, Amanda Plummer, David Thewlis Written & Directed by Paul Chart Cinematography by William Wages
AMERICAN PERFEKT knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be, but it doesn't know how to be it. It aspires to be a quirky road movie, but goes about it in the wrong way. It's as if debut writer/director Paul Chart held his material at arm's length, looked at it carefully, decided that he wanted it to be weird, and systematically applied cosmetic changes to make it seem weird, hoping that these surface changes would somehow sink into the bones of the story, transforming it. They don't.
Chart works from the outside in, but real weirdness comes from the inside and works its way out, distorting everything it touches along the way. It takes the eye of a David Lynch or a Joel Coen to make a really weird movie. Chart doesn't have that eye. This is not to say that he doesn't have talent; I think he does. But, in AMERICAN PERFEKT, I think his talent is wrongly applied. The premise is that of a thriller-cum-road-movie, pure and simple; the other stuff just gets in the way.
Robert Forster stars as Jake Nyman, a criminal psychologist obsessed with chance. In a world where science seems to have an answer to everything, Jake thinks the toss of a coin--a 50/50 proposition whose outcome cannot be known in advance--holds an uncertainty that is immensely appealing. He decides what to have for breakfast by tossing a coin; he decides who to kill by tossing a coin. Life, he believes, has become routine and predictable; people need the unexpected in their lives. This, he says, is the reason why white-collar petty crime, like shoplifting housewives, is on the rise; he takes this need for the unexpected to the extreme.
Forster, fresh off his Oscar nomination for JACKIE BROWN, does good work here. He seems like such a regular guy, in appearance and demeanor, but there is a maddening reasonableness in everything he says and does which subtly suggests the insanity of a serial killer. As he travels through California, two emotionally unbalanced sisters, Sandra and Alice (Amanda Plummer, Fairuza Balk), and a British con man (David Thewlis) will be involved in his fatal game of chance.
Each scene in the film has an off-kilter quality, as the characters talk and act in unpredictable ways, but there is no flow. Each scene seems to stand apart, and the weirdness does not progress according to any internal logic. Characters act strangely only because the script wants them to be strange. Alice at one point describes her ex-boyfriend as being "like all the colours you've never seen," yet nowhere else does she speak in this flowery fashion. Santini makes a comment about a piece of music which makes him want to cry--for no apparent reason, except that it's not the sort of thing you'd expect him to say. Nor are they an appealing bunch--Plummer, Balk, and Thewlis play people who are downright annoying. You want to grab them by the lapels and shake some sense into them. We don't care about them, so what we have to care about, if we are going to like the film, are the idiosyncracies that make the material fresh and compelling. But it is not idiosyncratic enough. The narrative momentum carries us past the weaker moments, but leads to a conclusion which is abrupt and unsatisfying. AMERICAN PERFEKT is not solid enough as a thriller to satisfy us, and not weird enough to intrigue and entertain as a bizarre road movie.
There are nice details. I liked Paul Sorvino as a small-town law official who seemed at first to be another of those incompetent hick sheriffs who are commonplace in movies, but turned out to be an efficient, reasonable guy, playing off our expectations. And Sharp has a flair for disorienting the viewer in small, subtle ways. Early in the film, Sandra and Jake are talking, and the camera pans right till we can only see Sandra, who keeps talking; moments later, Jake reappears on the opposite side of the frame, having circled around off-camera. It's a neat, disarming touch. Even the end credits scroll backwards, from bottom-to-top.
But all this stuff, which I liked, happens on the edges of the film. The centre does not hold. The story is incoherent, lacking background and resolution, leaving us with a series of encounters and incidents, loosely pieced together. Maybe all this incohesion is justified by Chart as being part of the randomness of life, the randomness celebrated by Jake in his own bloody way--but anyone can use that as an excuse for a bad movie. Cinema is not a random happening. And if Chart really wanted to make a movie which imitates the messy unpredictability of life, he shouldn't have used the overdetermined logic of a thriller to draw us in, then abandon that logic when it suited him. He wants to have his cake and eat it too; he plays with a two-headed coin, and as Jake himself observes in the movie, that's cheating.
A Review by David Dalgleish (March 21/98)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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