AMERICAN PERFEKT (director/writer: Paul Chart: cinematographer: William Wages; editor: Michael Ruscio; cast: Fairuza Balk (Alice), Robert Forster (Jake), Amanda Plummer (Sandra), David Thewlis (Santini), Paul Sorvino (Frank), Chris Sarandon (Sammy), Joanna Gleason (Shirley), 1997)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Perfekt is a psychological thriller about a psychopath, Jake Nyman (Forster), who decides someone's fate by the toss of his silver coin. The movie's locale is in the desert outside of Los Angeles county, where the 30-ish Sandra Thomas (Amanda Plummer-she's the wife of the director) is going to meet her 25-year-old hitchhiking, unbalanced, hippie sister, Alice (Balk), in a place called Pear Blossom and then the two will visit their mother in Utah. But the ex-secretary for a collection agency, having just been fired, is having a bad hair day, which only gets worst on the road. Sandra is driven off the road by a driver's road rage. The driver is a British con man named Santini (Thewlis), who it turns out was just trying to signal her about something he found and was not really a madman. When her car is stalled, she mistakeningly leaves her door open, as a speeding car crashes into her door and unhinges it. But that crash driver turns out to be a perfect gentleman, a criminal psychologist from Los Angeles, who happens to be single and handsome. He gives her a lift to the next roadside motel where she calls to get her car towed. She thinks she has struck it lucky and has finally met the man of her dreams. But she is only alive for the moment because he tossed a coin and she won the right to live, for awhile. You see, this Mr. Perfect turns out to be a madman.
These four (Forster, Plummer, Thewlis, and Balk) will play out life's game of chance, with Forster calling the coin tosses and therefore holding their lives in his hands. He exhibits signs of being a control freak, someone who might even be a nut case, by taking everything so literal and acting in a robotic and deliberate fashion when he speaks, so that everything he does seems out of place.
Paul Sorvino, as a local sheriff, brings renewed energy to the film, as he plays his role straight (thank the director for at least giving us one such real character in the film) as a small-town law officer who is more than willing to do his job. In fact, the acting in the film by everyone is really fine, especially considering how thin the script was. It is the story itself and the way it is directed that leads to the detriment of the film, allowing it to have the look of one of those films made only to be seen as a rental video, which indeed is how this film was released.
The film tries to play like noir, but only ends up being the kind of fake noir that is more irritating than complimentary. It tries to be purposefully evasive about its storyline and to have its tenuous story be based on chance as being the sole determinant of life. What it eventually becomes is a predictable psycho flick and not an unpredictable noir film, as it wanted to be. It has trapped itself into being a film without a plot, with rotten dialogue, and a fake means of maintaining tension. It tries so hard to give itself a weird angle through its characterizations, which only work on a superficial level-from the neurotic damsel-in-peril, Plummer- to the split personality performance of Forster, whose actions waiver between maniacally calm reasoning to histrionic schmaltz, as he goes off the deep end reciting rhymes.
The main problem, which the film is never able to overcome, is that the storyline is not that compelling and that the characters are not necessarily interesting even if they are quirky.The story never had a real strength to it; it always seemed like the actors were play-acting, that the script was struggling to device another gimmick to go with the coin toss motif, instead of letting the story seem to come about out of its own accord. What the director came up with as the other gimmick, was a two-headed coin to toss. This did not help explore anything going on inside the characters, only trivializing the story further, making it rely solely on a gimmick to tell its story.
What we are left with is a series of encounters among characters who are not that appealing in the first place, and also by the end of the film, we know only a little more about the psychopath than we did from the opening scene. I therefore wasn't sure what the director wanted to accomplish, except he probably thought by showing how idiosyncratic all the characters could be, that would be enough to get it over. If that was what he was thinking, he misjudged the quality of the film, but not before he showed flashes of talent here and there, for example, in the opening scene in the desert --- Forster's calm demeanor was played-off beautifully against Plummer's nervous energy, and with the desert lurking as a hostile backdrop to the action, it added a thrilling surreal sense of dramatics to the story. But the film fell too quickly into the serial-killer mode, and lost the edge it never had but always wanted.
REVIEWED ON 4/18/2000 GRADE: C-
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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