Lonesome Jim reviewed by Sam Osborn of www.samseescinema.com
rating: 1 out of 4
Director: Steve Buscemi Cast: Casey Affleck, Liv Tyler Screenplay: James C. Strouse MPAA Classification: R (language, some sexuality and drug content)
At the onset of Lonesome Jim, only the characters are depressed. The film's achievement is that, by its end, Lonesome Jim has succeeded in dragging us down into its blubbery depression along with it. It's a blithering idiot of a film. It's as if its writer, James Strouse, took the finest aspects of Napoleon Dynamite and Garden State, shoved them through a paper shredder, rumpled up the remains, stapled them into a screenplay, and handed it all to an unwitting Steve Buscemi, whose bottom know was stuck to the Director's Chair. It's almost uncanny how much Lonesome Jim mimics these two Sundance success stories. The title character, Jim (Casey Affleck), even kind of looks like the crazed surgical combination of Zach Braff and Jon Heder. But blatant mimicry isn't what bothers me here; it's the film's endless show of asinine indifference to human existence. If I wanted to watch a twentysomething loser wander around a small Midwest town in his own dribbling depression, I would drive twelve miles to the neighboring suburbs. I don't have to pay ten bucks for this vapidity.
On paper, Lonesome Jim is a winner. Jim returns home, broke from his ten year writing excursion to Manhattan, looking to spend some time with his family back home. Ernest Hemingway, to Jim, is a God; but for all the wrong reasons. His family's become stagnant, the father managing a factory, and Jim's brother stuck at home, single with two daughters. Only the mother (Mary Kay Place) shows definite vital signs. Jim only seems to make things worse, though. The second day he's back, Jim confesses to his brother the sad realities of their situation: "I'm a fuck-up, but you're a goddamn tragedy." An hour later the brother is wheeled into the hospital with a coma after attempting suicide. But Jim doesn't really seem to mind. It means he has more time to spend with his new, plucky girlfriend Anika (Liv Tyler), who brings along her nine-year-old son to all their awkward dates. But Jim screws things up with Anika, too. Not to mention his hand in bringing a DEA scandal to the family's factory doorstep and putting his mother behind bars. Yup. Jim's a regular golden child. But, admittedly, under the right direction and writing, Lonesome Jim stood a chance. Except, that chance was taken two years ago by Zach Braff. It was called Garden State.
It's not that Steve Buscemi is a poor director. After recently wrapping up my four season "The Sopranos" binge, the episodes under his direction stand out as some of the series' best. But what Buscemi has done here is simply tragic. He approaches the material with a rickety, rattling DV camera. The look is, of course, grainy and unprofessional, and meant to immerse us further into the normalcy of Jim and his family. The problem is that he got me to believe in Lonesome Jim's depression. I believed in his reality so much that when it was time for Lonesome Jim to reveal itself as a comedy, I couldn't make the transition. And as Jim and those around him sunk further and further into debilitating evils, Buscemi wanted us to laugh, but instead had made us want to pop some Prozac and drown ourselves in a quart of ice cream.
His film is a cold, soppy little thing. The acting is strange and lifeless, but probably by no fault of the actors. They mope around in slumped-over day dreams, wishing the world wasn't a wasteland and that people cared about their depression. I might have cared if Buscemi had the mind for drama. But this backwards comedy isn't funny, and is only a poor, blurry reflection of sadness in America's wasteland.
-www.samseescinema.com
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