Monday, October 08, 2012

GOLDTHWAIT’S FILM “GOD BLESS AMERICA” HOLDS THE MIRROR UP TO ALL OF US





It is the best of times; it is the worst of times.  We make love to our iPhones and our egos, while begrudging food for the poor and health care for the indigent.  I don’t know whether to disclose or disguise my disgust and disdain for the America of 2012: an America whose obstructionist Congress of hicks and rednecks, flat-earthers and holy-rollers, have wasted two years of our lives treating our kindest and wisest President worse than the shoeshine boy that they obviously wish he were; an America so engorged on violence and inured to it that the cause isn’t even discussed anymore, merely whether we prefer homicide or suicide; an America so dumbed down that it prefers its arts and entertainment in the form of reality TV, and its presidential elections, too.  No, I can’t decide whether to disclose or disguise my disgust and disdain.  Both paths have their perils.  If I disclose my disgust, then I’m unpatriotic.  If I disguise it, then I’m dishonest.  So I look for others to do it for me.

So where was Bobcat Goldthwait’s “God Bless America” in the 2012 Oscar lineup?  It’s nowhere to be found, nor would you be likely to have found it in a theater near you.  Ah, but that must be because its director is a washed-up stand-up whose best work was long ago, so he must be a hack director by definition.  Wrong again.  This is Goldthwait’s third major (independent) feature, including the critically acclaimed “World’s Greatest Dad” with Robin Williams and the movie “Sleeping Dogs Lie,” which preceded it.  However independent he might be, though, and however proud of it, still every filmmaker’s goal is not only to create good work, but to have others see it and appreciate it, and “get it” in the way it’s supposed to be gotten.  Yeah, you gotta’ have that, too, and you’d think GBA would’ve gotten some notice for the sheer amount of violence in it.  After all, even Bob Dole and other politicos chimed in on “Natural Born Killers” way back when, didn’t they?  Ah, but that was a different era, wasn’t it?

“God Bless America” is about the trials and tribulations of Frank, a loser who’s just lost his job, just found out he’s got brain cancer, been soundly rejected by his own daughter, and, worst of all it seems, is being subjected to a barrage of idiots, a**holes, and reality TV stars that overwhelm what little sense of sanity he has left.  Those are just the symptoms of the underlying problem, though, which is that people are just rude nowadays, and for no apparent reason, as if our civilization and religion and social niceties have all come to nought.  "Why have civilization if we no longer are interested in being civilized?" he asks; me, too.  So what does he do?  He does what we’ve all thought of doing at least in our worst nightmares.  He starts killing people, choosing them on the basis of the degree to which they annoy him.  In this he is joined by an adoring admirer, a teenage female misfit named Roxanne, who more or less agrees with the annoying nature of modern civilization and is looking for other outlets than the collected works of Alice Cooper and transcendant power ballads such as “Only Women Bleed.”  Hey, you gotta have heroes.

So they don appropriate couture for the task ahead and proceed to start wasting people, right and left, mostly by gun, sometimes by knife or cord, as if each person were merely a ridiculous word balloon waiting to be popped, another over-puffed ego deflated, another bad joke tossed in the can.  Frank isn’t immoral, though, quite the opposite, and any love interest with his teenage partner is strictly kept in check.  He won’t even attempt to get his finger wet in his desire for Roxanne, who he obviously loves more by now than anything in this world, and who is at the same time a surrogate wife and daughter.  No, he sticks to the business at hand, which is to rid the world of pompous asses and poseurs, a jihad of the soul, a jihad of sorts.  This all changes when he finds out that he doesn’t really have brain cancer, and that Roxanne is not really an abused child, as she had told him.  Not only that, but the most famous reality TV star of all, adored simply because he is the most hideous, didn’t attempt suicide because they were laughing at him; he attempted suicide because they tried to cancel him.  You can guess the rest.  It’s a shootout at the not-so-OK-corral.  Fortunately, Roxanne is back at his side by then, so they get to waste quite a few before they themselves are wasted.  Joe Bob Briggs must have had a field day.  I don’t know why the cops never showed up before this.

But the movie is not so much violent, as it is about violence, the violence within us and without us, that and an unhealthy handful of other ungodly traits that define the age in which we live.  Maybe that’s the difference in the “Natural Born Killers” that author Tarantino wanted to make and the one that Oliver Stone actually did make, and which they famously fought over; but I doubt it.  Goldthwait has done something here which I prize most in my favorite artists and authors.  He has put something very heavy in a light easily digestible format.  This is not disgusting blood-and-guts violence.  This is meta-violence, conceptual violence, violence of the palette.  I for one can certainly appreciate it, not only for the reason that I am not alone in my disgust of most things 2012 American, but for a day, at least a day, I can let someone else do the heavy lifting, while I sit back and pontificate, nodding slightly and thinking, ‘see, I told you so.’ 

I have only one complaint about “God Bless America,” and that’s that there are not enough low camera angles in the world to make The Music Box (Fonda Theatre, whatever) on Hollywood Boulevard look big enough to host an American Idol-like major TV show.  But I only know that because I pass by there often to get my little cup of black meat as part of Trader Joe’s™ free caffeine-maintenance program.  I even passed by there yesterday because my wife forgot to take her little Tupperware™ bowl of rice to work.  Hey, you gotta’ have rice.  But I have nothing but admiration for the high concept of the film.  We’re killing ourselves, mass suicide of the species by the species, the first apocalypse ever televised.  We’re driving off a cliff, guns all ablaze, grinning like Cheshires, with no bottom in sight.  After all, would there be any unemployment, hunger, epidemic or war if we all grew our own food and made our own clothes and shared the fruits of our arts and labors willingly and openly with each other and with respect for the Creation of which we are all a part?  No, I don’t think so.  That’s “God Bless America,” starring Joe Murray and Tara Lynne Barr, available now at a Netflix website near you.  Check it out.    
 



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