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NO SUCH THING (2001)
Sarah Polley in a ribbony, boob-hoisting black dress? I'm there! Sometimes, box art is easily enough to suck you in. Polley plays a mild-mannered office flunky at a New York news...actually I didn't catch if this was a newspaper, or a magazine, or TV news, or what. Anyway, she's sent to Iceland to investigate some legend of a horrible monster that her fiancée died looking for. We know the monster's real, because he's on the cover of the box, and plays the first scene by himself. He's played by Robert John Burke; great monster makeup, good fire-breathing effects, and Burke plays him as an alcoholic, bored, grumbly, and most of all exhausted creature who once watched mankind hurl himself squamously from the primordial ooze (or something) and after all this time gets asked questions like "A monster, in the modern day? Isn't that kind of...irrelevant?" You can see why he has little patience for what that ooze became. When he starts to establish a rapport with the girl, it's probably because she asks him the right questions. For its first half, No Such Thing is a little slow, but it works. After a rough trip to Iceland (to say the least) which toughens her up a little, Polley's heroine is a little like the one she'd play in the Dawn Of The Dead remake - soft-spoken, with a gentle spirit, but with nerves of steel. Burke is funny, even if I can't quite figure out why a millennia-old monster who lives on an Icelandic rock speaks American English. The urban and rural locations in Iceland are beautiful, and descriptions of life back home (terrorist threats are so omnipresent that two separate ones thwart her commute to work one morning, and the President is on a suicide watch) are a hoot, even if they don't really seem to be reflected in the day-to-day life of everybody around her. That last bit is part of why things start falling apart when she convinces the monster to come back to New York with her. The entire world's falling apart in this movie, New York faster than the rest, but other than two people getting shot at the airport, this is never actually in evidence. We hear about this dystopia, but it's all talk. I was amused that terrorists were so casually equated with "religious people", and apparently the mayor has sold lower Manhattan to a Hollywood studio. The monster's reception in New York is about what you'd expect (celebrity, indifference, hostility), and wasn't I just muttering about how movies have conditioned us to assume certain things about how government and scientists would handle meeting a non-human intelligence? This is only contributing to that. They poke and prod and electrocute him - isn't there about a million times more you could learn by staying on his good side? No Such Thing aims to be, essentially, a sweet fable and works more often than not; but its freshness expires long before it's over because of its move from unpredictability (who would've guessed her flight to Iceland would've worked out quite that way?) to super-predictability. The ever-likeable Polley just loses us when she gets back to New York too, black dress or no; she just stops doing anything, except what the plot tells her to. Beautiful score by writer/director Hal Hartley, featuring a lot of backwards-sounding passages, and the movie's Icelandic settings are the stuff of aeons of monsterly isolation. The story isn't, but it's great to look at...for a while. (c) Brian J. Wright 2006 BACK TO THE N's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |