Moviegoer Diary: Stuck; Vernon, Florida

STUCK

Plot In A Nutshell
Stuart Gordon’s thriller about a nurse (Mena Suvari) who runs into a homeless man (Stephen Rea) with her car, drives him with him stuck in her windshield, and then, fearful of getting the law involved, simply leaves him like that in her garage, slowly dying.

Thoughts
I’ve never been able to resist a gimmicky thriller. I think I got hooked on this stuff as a kid, when I discovered The Twilight Zone. I was especially fascinated by those episodes where the technical challenge of writing the episode was as important as the characters or the final twist — I loved the concept of a story that was told without dialogue, or where you never got to see the face of the main character until the final shot, or where the whole episode was about six people, all of them in weird costumes, who wake up at the bottom of a tall well, and then have to figure out who they are and how they got there. (Turns out they’re dolls at the bottom of a donation bin!)

I’m still addicted to this stuff, which greatly appeals to the Aspergerish part of my personality. I don’t think I ever expect movies like Phone Booth or The Lady in the Lake or Time Code to be especially good; I just can’t wait to see how the screenwriter sustains the gimmick over the course of a feature film. That’s the reason I keep going to see all those silly POV horror movies like Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead, and why I watched [REC] and Quarantine — which are essentially identical movies! — within a few days of each other.

It’s also why I was looking forward to Stuck — how was Stuart Gordon going to wring out an entire movie’s worth of suspense out of Stephen Rea trying to wriggle free from a windshield? (Stephen King is really good at these locked-room premises, by the way. As a teenager, I remember loving those short stories of his, like the one where a guy would be forced by a crazy rich dude to walk once around a building on the ledge, hundreds of stories off the ground... or the one where a doctor gets shipwrecked on a desert island and starts amputating parts of his own body and eating them in order to survive.)

Turns out, Gordon does a pretty efficient job of it — although the scene where Suvari’s neighbours discover him only to decide not to call the authorities because they’re illegal aliens and can’t risk exposure is a little aggravating. The final showdown between Rea and Suvari is pretty entertaining too — partly because it’s so satisfying to see Suvari punished for her callous behaviour, and partly because of the way Gordon concocts a reasonably believable B-movie scenario whereby a gravely injured man with no weapons could still defeat not just a healthy younger woman but her beefy boyfriend too. I was rooting not just for Rea but for the script — “Hooray! You pulled off the third act! Good for you!”

RATING: 4/5

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VERNON, FLORIDA

Plot In A Nutshell
Errol Morris’ 1982 documentary about the loquacious residents of a small town in Florida.

Thoughts
And why did I watch Vernon, Florida? Because it was short — not even an hour — and it seemed like a quick way to add another notch to my moviewatching rifle.

But as anyone who’s seen this mysterious little movie can tell you, you could watch it over and over again — 10 times, 25, 100 — and still feel like there were more hidden connections to uncover, and more pieces of accidental folk wisdom to ponder. A camera is like a gun, says one of Morris’ interviewees; if you point it at something, you might get what you’re shooting at, but then again, you might not. And that certainly seems true of this film, which Morris apparently intended as the story of a bunch of people who cut off their limbs as part of an insurance scam (his original title: Nub City), only to rework it into Vernon, Florida when his intended subjects threatened his life. (Even though they were missing arms and legs, apparently Morris felt they could still inflict some damage on him.)

I’d love to see some of that Nub City footage, but it’s hard to imagine that film could be any more funny and poetic than Vernon, Florida. Boy, do I wish Morris would fire Philip Glass, leave the studio, drop that portentous, meticulously art-directed style he’s favoured ever since The Thin Blue Line (and which reached its nadir, in my opinion, with Standard Operating Procedure), and get back to movies like this one, where it feels like Morris is letting his subjects dictate the tone and style of the final film.

And yet, at the same time, the film feels like nothing more than a statement of Morris’ personal filmmaking philosophy. Wait long enough, the film seems to be saying — whether you’re a hunter in the trees, a policeman idling in a car, or just an old-timer wasting time on a bench — and the very thing you’re looking for will soon arrive. Some people, and I have a feeling Morris might even be one of them, call that God.



RATING: 5/5