BEFORE: As long as we're all feeling nostalgic for our high-school years, I'll watch this one next. I figured this film would be difficult to link to, since it only has three actors - however, two of them are high-profile actors, so I figured there would be a way to get from Peter O'Toole to one of them. Imagine my surprise when that road seemed blocked - however, salvation came. Sian Phillips from "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" was also in "The Age of Innocence" with Robert Sean Leonard (last seen in "Dead Poets Society"), which is sort of astounding.
THE PLOT: Three old high school friends pass the time in a Michigan motel room dissecting the painful memories of their high school years.
AFTER: Recently I've been seeing a lot of the Jean-Paul Sartre quote "Hell is other people", which people love to use when someone cuts them off in traffic, or walks down the street ahead of them much too slowly, or has their headphone volume turned up much too loud. Just because someone is pissing you off, that doesn't mean you are in hell. Not the literal fire-and-brimstone hell, I know you're over-exaggerating to make a point, but let's not drag Sartre into this if you can't quote him correctly.
Sartre wrote a very famous play called "No Exit" (the French title actually means something closer to "Behind Closed Doors") in which the afterlife is depicted as a locked room, surprisingly without fire or any torture devices, but with three people carefully selected to drive each other crazy. They confess their various crimes to each other, and conclude that they're stuck with each other for all eternity - see, it's quite literal, hell is other people.
There's a certain set of films that are confined, Sartre-like, to just one location - some succeed, some don't. Within the genre you've got films like "Clerks", "Phone Booth", "Twelve Angry Men", and a whole host of prison films. Then there's "Rear Window", "The Breakfast Club", "Moon", "Alien", and I'm sure I must be missing a bunch.
This brings me to "Tape", which is a conversation between two high-school friends (and later in the film, three) who have the uncanny ability to get under each other's skin, pick at the old wounds from high-school, and after a while we start to wonder if they really are friends, or if one has set a trap for the other. And when the third character is introduced, everything shifts once more and we just don't know who's going to end up in control of the situation.
Which makes me wonder why these friends would all stick around and take these accusations and abuses from each other - why don't any of them leave? OK, one leaves, but he comes right back. Wait, wait, I've got it - the motel room is hell, right? And they're stuck there tormenting each other for all eternity, right? Well, I guess if this had been an episode of "The Twilight Zone" it could easily have gone in that direction...instead we get to hear these three people verbally beat each other up for 86 minutes.
The problem is, the actual heart of the matter would have been, for anyone else, a 10-minute conversation. Did you do this? No? OK, I believe you. What about that? And they would each, of course, know what they were referring to when they say "this" and "that". But our actors here seemed to have been tasked with making this 10-minute conversation feature-length, so there's a lot of repetition, and a lot of confusion about THE THING they were JUST TALKING ABOUT, which of course drives me nuts. Everyone has some form of selective amnesia and feels the need to repeat the same story points over and over - were they not given any others? Or did they just get a loose framework of plot points that they had to keep going back to, like constantly re-dipping a quill pen?
Unless, wait, wait, I've got it - these characters were designed to drive ME crazy! But that would mean that I'M in hell...oh, that's not good.
NITPICK POINT: Why would anyone open two beers, and drink one while letting the other one drain into the sink? I've seen many, many variations on shotgunning, but I can't imagine someone choosing to consume AND waste beer at the same time, for any reason.
Also starring Ethan Hawke (last seen in "Taking Lives"), Uma Thurman (last seen in "Paycheck").
RATING: 3 out of 10 cans of Rolling Rock
No comments:
Post a Comment