Had I known anything about this movie ahead of time, I cannot imagine I would have agreed to see it in a theater, but having only the vaguest notion of its premise–leaning over to Friend before the opening credits, “It’s a… Western? BJ Novak? Issa Rae?”–it became my first movie back from summer break. AMC boldly describes this movie as one of its “artisan films,” which means that despite there being approximately 4 people in the theater on the Sunday night of its opening weekend, AMC is contractually obligated to host this film on an actual screen for several more weeks. I, on the other hand, am not contractually obligated to speak kindly about it, so let’s dish.
Since you are unlikely to ever see this movie, let me describe it to you as the poor man’s Hell or High Water. Through a series of misunderstandings, BJ Novak finds himself attending the funeral of a hookup who thought of them as more than friends with benefits. Novak’s cringe humor is reminiscent of some of the most painful moments of the early seasons of The Office, and the inane, pitchy patter of Novak and his friend feels well-worn and familiar. The dialogue is a little too familiar in fact, something that would have probably benefited from a little distance from a project that he wrote, directed, and starred.
Novak’s creative control over the film leads to some unintentionally cringe moments, like when he pensively listens to the wise words of a Texas hick and finds himself amazed by the brilliance they impart–which happens to be something he himself has written. Issa Rae and Ashton Kutcher both find themselves feeding Novak weirdly meta encouragement about the quality of his own writing, as the movie attempts to consume itself through a contrivance of being a movie about a podcast about a murder that’s aware of other true crime podcasts.
Movies about podcasts have reached a saturation point, making Vengeance feel at times like a satire of the art film (thinking specifically of a much more self-serious experiment in visualizing podcasting as an art form, which cameo’d the one and only Molly Webster, C’mon C’mon). In this movie public radio royalty Terry Gross stars as the mysterious “Rachel,” who is the host of This American Life’s evil twin; Issa Rae fills the illusory role of PoC host for a major public radio storytelling show. Ultimately, none of the editorial meetings that Novak takes with his wireless earphones adds all that much to the story. It feels like cluttered process notes that ought to have been cut at best, and at worst is the overheard self-soothing of an insecure writer-director-star.
What we’re left with when we aren’t listening to fractals of Novak’s writing voice parrot his GUT about the opioid crisis and the fragmentation of American society back to himself is actually a pretty little gem of a story about a family seeking answers for an unexpected death from a man who has none. The Texas poor man’s Dear Evan Hansen, if you will. But telling a story free from the constraints of that contrivance would have required a more fleshed out dead girlfriend, one with conversations and flashbacks and stories to have been told by her survivors. That movie would have required the patience to wallow in the winter sequence. It would’ve required a backstory, or at least a set of experiences to build upon his assumptions about how the Other Half of America lives. Instead, we’re trapped in a semi-focalized perspective of a fictive West Coast elite dudebro in a funhouse mirror of rural Texas where locals carbomb your Prius for supporting the Longhorns (yes, actually). But nuance is not what Vengeance, for all of its posturing about being surprised and patient, is about. Vengeance doesn’t care about the “Dead White Girl” that its storytellers seem to gravitate towards, and in the end neither do we.
