Rated R for some violent images and language
Cast: Stephen Spinella, Jack Plotnick, Thomas F. Duffy, Hayley Holmes, Roxane Mesquida
Director: Quentin Dupieux
I admired the irreverence it brought, but I didn't quite love it. "Rubber" tells the most unorthodox story in the most atypical way. That's a good thing. It also came off, to me anyway, as a might too happy with itself. Little effort seems wasted in patting itself on the back, evidenced by the movie's final shot which appears to be firing the ultimate fuck you-bomb toward any type of Hollywood convention. I suspect writer/director Quentin Dupieux hails himself as the sole champion of revolutionary storytelling... the life of the heterodox narrative cinema party, if you will... without quite realizing that he is, point of fact, a couple years late to said party. More on that later.
There was something else I found a little perplexing. The movie has an inexplicable need to try and out-gimmick itself. It has a great idea (an inanimate tire comes to life in the desert, rolls around the landscape, discovers it possesses destructive telepathic powers, begins exploding the heads of various people, and develops a crush on a sexy young drifter) that is piggybacked by a so-so idea (a kind of Mystery Science Theatre angle, as a group of onlookers view the events as though watching a movie through binoculars and making comments on the transpiring events). Both plots are given equal consideration. I enjoyed the telepathic tire angle, but couldn't quite grasp the desert audience... why not just make a great B-thriller about a tire with telepathic powers? Is Dupieux seriously telling us that that idea isn't irreverent enough? What, he felt he needed to weird it up a bit? Seriously?
But maybe that's the point. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the movie isn't really about plot at all. It's all about the gimmick; the unconventional storytelling. The entire movie, essentially, is explained by Lieutenant Chad (Stephen Spinella) in an opening address to the aforementioned audience, "Ladies and gentlemen, the film you are about to see today is an homage to the no reason... that most powerful element of style." Okay, on that strict level, the movie more or less works. Is it clever? Sure. Does it leave an impression? For me, none that lasted beyond the film's running time.
Director Dupieux does, however, demonstrate skill behind the camera. The stuff involving the tire works quite well. Conveying an object's growing awareness of its surroundings is no easy task, yet the movie accomplishes this with surprising skill. Everything from its groggy first attempts to "roll" itself out of its sedentary position to discovering telepathic abilities to developing an attraction for a female to a fit of rage upon seeing a mountain of tires being burned in a junkyard is handled quite effectively...
Which is why I had a hard time understanding Dupieux's need to muddy his artistry with needless twists and parallel plots. Yeah, I know he's being unconventional, but let's be honest here... he's not exactly reinventing the wheel. (No pun intended.) Many great directors have already bucked the conventional storytelling trend. Not just from contemporary artists like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, but going back to Kubrick, Altman, and others. Even recently, Terrence Malick molded his own distinct narrative in "The Tree of Life." Those directors went unconventional at the service of telling their own stories and conveying their own messages in their own ways. Dupieux, by contrast, is merely pissing on Hollywood convention. There's nothing wrong with that, but I'm reminded of something Roger Ebert wrote in his review of Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs"... "Now that he (Tarantino) has proven he can make a movie like this, it's time for him to make a better one."
Hell, I have no idea if anything I've written gives you the slightest sense of what the film is really like. I suspect, though, that's inevitable. The fact that I didn't love the movie as much as my filmmaking friends really doesn't surprise me; I imagine those who dabble in cinema artistry itself will profit more from the experience. My own praise has its limit as films like this, while inventive, don't really engage me to the point of adoration. But I'll give it its due... the movie is gloriously off-beat and it is, after all, the "Citizen Kane" of inanimate-tires-coming-to-life-and-killing-people movies.
An homage to the art of no reason, indeed.
* * 1/2 out of * * * * stars
