Living proof that catastrophes happen on a small scale too. This modest Western comedy probably didn’t set out to hurt anyone. It’s unlikely it was created with the express intention of molesting its viewer with trite, empty progressive platitudes. Someone said once that satire is the genre of literature that most closely resembles the thing it’s attempting to critique and is often mistaken for that thing. It’s clear from the get-go, the title in fact, that this movie is hunting for the scalps of its brethren in the romantic genre, but it doesn’t have much going for it beyond that acerbic aversion to its foil. Damsel‘s incessant navel-gazing leads it off track early, spinning a set of two or three fresh, self-aware scenes into a repetitive merry-go-round of kidnapping and escape.
Damsel doesn’t give you clues about how shitty it will be early on. It tricks you into it, frog-in-boiling pot style, so that by the time you realize what you’ve done to your afternoon, you’re already pot-committed and without the means to leave, also there’s a heatwave outside and a friend sleeping on your living room sofa so, eh, why not stay to see if it sorts itself out. The scene where Robert Pattinson’s Samuel comes into town with Butterscotch, the miniature horse, in tow taps into a kind of absurdist humor that’s unusual for the genre and works well (even if the town drunk is laughing a little harder than the audience does). The crabs on Parson Henry, drunk on the beach, are a nice touch, unnecessary, absurdist props that work the same way that that meme of someone balancing hundreds of goldfish crackers on their sleeping cat works. It’s funny because he’s asleep. It’s funny because they’re goldfish. It feels right because it’s wrong. Butterscotch. He’s too short for the trough. It’s good. The town drunk laughs until his throat is sore and then the town hangs him to a yodeler’s accompaniment. Our misfit duo sets out onto the prairie just as a young boy dragging the hangman’s chair leaves in the opposite direction. The incongruence is deliciously ironic, grim and musical.
One of the best scenes is at the water’s edge, when Samuel locks eyes with whistling, clueless Rufus Cornell and a stumbling, bumbling chase ensues. We get a little bit of Who Shot First? business. The violence of the scene (and the movie in general) is cartoonish and brawly and rough, gritty and dirty, which I like generally. We see the blood splatter. The camera doesn’t pull away for a gunshot to the head or a pissing dick on a corpse or TNT cratering a bad guy. At first glance it feels a little like a Coen Brothers movie, some Tarantino humor. You hear a voice in your head that says, “I like when sibling duos make movies”. The Zellner Brothers, who directed, wrote, and starred in their own movie. You think, Duffer brothers, Wachowski sisters. You’re lulled into a false sense of security by a time-worn formula like a slow-gas leak, like carbon monoxide poisoning.
After Samuel dies, the plot drifts like so many passengers from the Titanic. Robert Pattinson is yet again a chameleon in his role, but not enough, apparently, to have faded from the production before he’d read his final lines half an hour into the film. SPOILER ahead: suicide, generally, is the coward’s way out of writing a script with real consequences. There are places where it’s done well, earned, with a roadmap for how to continue, like in Three Billboards in Ebbing, MO., where the suicide is shocking and denotes a sharp end to the first act. Then there are scripts where suicide or its attempt feels lazy and cheap, like in the indie Skeleton Twins from a few years back. (I think Dead Poets Society must have felt like it was being very avant-garde at the time, but it’s become part of a nasty trope in drama, so I don’t get why people always recommend that movie to me whenever I tell them I’m a teacher.) The remaining characters are left to parrot feminist critiques of the script itself for the duration of the film, in a way that’s hard to tell whether it’s on purpose or an improvised cry for help.
Mia Wasikowska was dealt a rough hand on this one. I had to look her up to make sure she wasn’t Brie Larson, which she is not. And she’s actually had a pretty great run of films in the past five years, excepting her work with Johnny Depp on the Alice in Wonder-What-She-Was-Thinking-CGI-Land on not one but two projects: one of my favorite films, Only Lovers Left Alive, and The Double with Jesse Eisenberg (2013), then Guillermo Del Toro-adjacent Crimson Peak (2015). It’s hard when your job for your first meeting with the audience is to threaten the protagonist we’ve spent the whole movie with and shriek and wail over the death of a character none of us has seen before. Is this how JLaw felt in Mother!? She did the best she could with a rotten script and I like to think that at least some of the side eye she gives in the second act is meant as much for the Zellner Brothers both behind the camera and in scene with her.
How It Could’ve Been Better. The pain of watching this movie is at least as much from shaking your goddamn head at how little it tries to do as it is from knowing that it could’ve been so much better. Pop Culture Detective has already done a bang-up job of talking about Abduction as Romance, so anything I say will just be reductive. I think a few people have floated the idea of changing the perspective of the story in order to improve upon the final cut, as in the case of Passengers (2016). Even while we were watching, I kept thinking about how much better things could’ve been if they had ended the film at the half way point and interspersed scenes of Mia living a quirky, happy life with Cornell, additional comic relief, a vast plain for witty banter and fast-paced jokes. The only explanation that I can muster is that maybe the actor who plays Penelope’s husband wasn’t up to the task of speaking on camera? Maybe he has a super high voice and it would’ve been too distracting, and they couldn’t find a way to believably dub over it? The movie would’ve been so much more fun if we had been in on the joke from the start, and the tension would’ve been so much greater if we had had an attachment to Cornell and Penelope before that final confrontation. The most boring scenes of the film are in the second act (maybe everything after Parson Henry’s decision with the rifle?). It might have made the film a lot tighter and given the film more room to consider its major theme and feminist critique if it had given Penelope more focused time instead of making us try to anticipate her motives while she meanders back a fairly straightforward path to town. Instead, we get an hour of men tripping over themselves to play the fall-guy to her straight-man, which gets old fast.
Tomorrow we discovered that 3Below (this was our first film since the change of ownership) is showing the 4-hour cut of Fellowship of the Ring. I love the variety of stuff they’re putting on: silent films, Bond marathons, even the 80s classics. Good to be back in San Jose after two weeks of tropical bliss.
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