by Will Ross
---
JR (played by co-writer Carlen Altman) has been thrown out of her ex-boyfriend/ex-professor’s house, and is set to make a road trip to go back and get her stuff. For help, she enlists her brother Colin (director and co-writer Alex Ross Perry), who once wanted to be a writer, but has settled for writing copy for focus group presentations while living in his parents’ attic and in a dead-end relationship. JR is no better: she is a college dropout who aspires to become an actor or news anchor, but does very little to make those things happen. Her routine, according to Colin, is to “sleep until noon, leave the house three days a week, deplete your savings while you chase down pathetic weather girl jobs.”
As that quote may suggest, the pair relentlessly project their self-loathing onto each other, and much of the film works because of the chemistry between Altman and Perry as the siblings demolish each other’s egos. The Color Wheel easily launches through its first half, ending in yet another fruitless eradication of self-esteem between JR and her former flame (played with despicable smugness by Bob Byington). Besides this, though, it's only really compelling in scenes between the leads, who both turn in strong performances, particularly Altman, whose sneering sarcasm and evasions mask a girl who never outgrew her neediness and sloth, but never let go of her dreams, either.
Unfortunately, the film soon introduces spiteful, empty caricatures of uppity suburbanites. This results in a 15-minute party sequence that plays like a nastier, shallower version of one of Woody Allen’s dilettante social satires. None of the supporting players seem up to the task. Outside of this sequence, there are always personal motivations and human feelings behind the barbs volleyed between characters, but here, it all comes off as unmotivated nastiness. Ideally, this parade of cynicism would be the weak point in an otherwise fine film.
But now we come to the ending, and since I can’t properly discuss it in “you-know-what” terms, consider this a spoiler warning for the rest of the review.
Read More
JR and Colin leave the party and head for their grandparents’ cabin, where they fall into incest with unsettling naturalism and sensuality. It is, though shocking, the logical conclusion. Sexual tension has slowly built between the two throughout the film, and their acerbic insistence at keeping a challenging outside world at bay has bordered on — well, the incestuous.The problem isn't with that scene, but with the ending proper, which takes a shocking climax in the completely wrong direction. Diving into subject matter as shocking and provocative as incest demands thematic justification, and it’s there, waiting to be zipped up into the rest of the movie. But as the two say a quiet goodbye, the awkward sentimentality is tonally out of whack with everything before it. All the satire and wit disappear into a denouement that reads as little more than a cliche. The problem with the incest isn’t that it doesn’t fit the rest of the movie. The problem is that it fools the movie’s ending into thinking it’s about a tragic incestuous romance, when The Color Wheel should have incest as the punchline, not the point.
0 comments:
Post a Comment