When movie stars should send screenwriters to jail: Law Abiding Citizen

Just before Clarence Darby (Christian Stolte) jabs a blade into his guts, just before Darby proceeds to rape and kill his wife and do about the same to his little girl, Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) hears this fat, sweaty, slovenly, drug-addled, disgusting pervert-ogre whisper in his ear, “You can’t fight fate.” Even by the standards of the overcharged Hollywood thriller this is ultra-portentous. Clyde takes it to heart. He stews over it for ten years, during which time Darby’s accomplice awaits execution while Darby himself does three years and goes free as thanks from the DA for ratting his buddy out. For ten years Clyde gets stoked on the ineffectuality of American justice and concocts a whopper of a plan to set things straight.

The central conceit of Law Abiding Citizen, that grief and frustration turns a contented family man and otherwise non-psychopathic maniac into Hannibal Lecter on steroids, could only have ever worked as utter camp. As an ostensibly serious, ostensibly engaging, ostensibly dark and brooding thriller about thorny issues of crime, punishment and bureaucracy, it’s a mind-numbingly absurd travesty of a movie. Clyde kidnaps Darby and slowly, messily tortures him to death, making imaginative use of power tools a poison isolated from the liver of a Caribbean puffer fish. Of course! It’s only his opening act. He gets thrown into maximum security and his rampage only escalates. Somehow he keeps exacting his flamboyant, baroque feats of violent revenge from captivity, gradually killing off anyone with even the most tangential connection to his case. Except for Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), the attorney who made the deal with Darby. Nick gets to watch as the whole house of cards collapses, wondering when he or his wife and daughter will get iced. Clyde and Nick play cat and mouse.

You don’t need a degree in law, psychology or engineering to balk at the mountain of risible improbability Law Abiding Citizen hinges on. Genius serial killers are among the most tiresome tropes, but Clyde Shelton and his reign of terror go far beyond the usual level of artifice and dumbness. Yet even if the basic story, which comes courtesy of Street Kings and Ultraviolet scribe Kurt Wimmer, weren’t so stupid, the details too feel all wrong, from our glimpses of Nick’s cardboard family life to the inner chambers of play-cynical Philadelphia lawmakers. The film’s only reason for existing is to try and keep you from guessing what moronic plot twist it’ll unleash next, until you finally realize that this thriller is really a horror movie, torture porn of sorts. It wants to be tough, I guess, but it’s really just crude, very, very silly, and more than a little sick.

Butler is on some kind of a roll. Here’s a sampling: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, RocknRolla, The Ugly Truth. Dude’s been in some of the worst shit I’ve had to sit through over the last few years. I’m inclined to indulge a guy trying to move up in the system a little, but to what end? Does his producer’s credit mean to imply that Law Abiding Citizen is his fucking dream project? Does he secretly fantasize being confined to a prison from which he can slaughter his own career by remote control?

One last stray observation. There's an important early sequence where Darby's condemned accomplice gets executed by the state. As the sequence builds to its climax we keep cutting back and forth between the execution and a musical recital where Jamie Foxx's daughter plays the cello. Followers of this blog wonder with me: were the makers of Law Abiding Citizen studying The Walking Dead, or what?

A troubled, nearly transcendent duet: The Soloist

The based-on-true-story premise reads as pretty pedestrian. LA Times staffer crashes his bike, bashes his head, runs into a homeless head case and secretly virtuosic cellist, and hits upon a knockout idea for his column. Good copy leads to friendship, which leads to second chances, increased public awareness of homelessness, and so on. But The Soloist plumbs deeper into interdependence and responsibility than such cynical synopsizing lets on. It does indeed deliver the (feel-)goods, but what it lets us feel good about is failure, fleeting victories, and unnerving ambiguities.

Nathaniel Ayers wears some crazy duds, including a jacket with a patch on it that reads VISITOR. This seems apt as Nathaniel’s P-Funk-hits-the-skids outfits and erratic, verbose behaviour can render him otherworldly to amused passersby. Yet VISITOR can also be construed as ironic, given that Nathaniel’s one of 90,000 homeless people in Greater Los Angeles, a population that may not have an address but is hardly just passing through. Jamie Foxx’s performance as Nathaniel is immersive and specific. He grants Nathaniel his rightful charisma without being needlessly ingratiating. We come to care about Nathaniel terribly, but, despite the misguided efforts of director Joe Wright—more on that in a moment—we're never fooled into thinking we can fully comprehend his wildly fraught interior world. And anyway, it’s not his story.

Steve Lopez is the journalist, a workaholic in an imploding industry, and our protagonist. As their association thickens, Steve seems to believe he can save Nathaniel from drowning in marginality and madness, and this is where The Soloist, scripted by Susannah Grant from Lopez’s memoir, bucks against formula. Robert Downey Jr. invests Steve with layers of guilt and uncertainty that no amount of energy, column inches or phone calls can ease. With nuances that play out with wonderful clarity across his wearied face, Downey’s is a grounding presence. His desperation never makes a spectacle of itself, but rather burrows into his engaging surface cocksureness and flurry of conflicting desires.

Making a spectacle however seems to be Wright’s overriding raison d’être. I appreciate Wright’s willingness to infuse unabashed emotionalism into his camerawork, but there are scenes in The Soloist that, recalling Wright’s cripplingly show-offy work and penchant for bathos in Atonement, suffer from a lack of trust in the material. Wright tries too hard to externalize Nathaniel’s subjective confusion and bliss, which at its worst apes the third-act psychedelic freak-out of 2001. At times Wright verges on rendering homelessness as tastefully aestheticized and numbingly maudlin. On the other hand, the film’s rhythms are immaculate. The Soloist is partly about the transcendence of music, and, in harmony with this, Paul Tothill’s taut, melodic editing feels utterly inspired.