THE OPPORTUNITY THAT WAS MISSED BY "THE PAPERBOY"

Well, with Lee Daniels’ The Butler looming on the horizon, no time like the present for a Lee Daniels mini-retrospective! Oh, you know how I love long words. What I really mean is that I got a chance to see The Paperboy recently – and grabbed. I was quite excited to see it too, I loved Precious and this was a true story too. A true crime story to be precise and you all know by now that I have a huge “gory tooth” as far as true crime goes. I checked the imdb score – it wasn’t high – but I didn’t let that trouble me as I have found that my view of a film often doesn’t match up with its review. This time however… Heartbreak and disappointment I’m afraid. The film made its way onto the blog from the sheer amount of potential it holds. And because well, it’s my blog and I want to rant.

Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman) is in a very deeply passionate relationship with Hilary Van Wetter (Jon Cusack). This may sound like a normal enough sentence but there is one problem. Mr Van Wetter is on death row for murder and he and Charlotte have barely met face to face. This is by no means Charlotte’s first prison pen-pal, but it is definitely the most passionate affair she has been in. She is determined that it is fate that brought her and Hilary together and that she will find a way to get him out of prison. To this end, she contacts Ward Jensen (Matthew McConaughey), a reporter whom she asks to prove, somehow, that Hilary is innocent. Hilary and his partner Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo) begin to look into the case and there are indeed some technicalities in the story that have been overlooked. Well and even if they lacked motivation, Charlotte is quite a character… So much so that Ward’s younger brother Jack (Zac Effron) is absolutely besotted with her, following her and the investigation around wherever it may lead. One thing is for sure: Charlotte is onto something. It’s just that it may not quite be what she thinks it is…

One thing I can take my hat off to Mr Daniels for is this: He sure knows how to pick a story. Think of his two other “true story” films, Precious and now the up-coming The Butler… And as we all know, the backbone to a good film is a good story. After all, we go to “watch” a film, it is a very visual experience and how the story unrolls is very important, but it is easy to be accused of being all flash and fire and no substance, like a lot of action based films. (Latest example to that being Neil Bomkamp’s Elysium). Now this film has substance. It has tension, it has huge conflict, so we’re all set for a good show, right?

Well… See, you might find it hard to believe with a film of this kind, where there is no CGI, no special effects, no monsters or robots, but what Lee Daniels does here is, sorry to say, exactly the same thing. The visual side of it is… Well  I don’t want to say all wrong but, it’s… It’s too much. It’s totally ok (hey, it might even be considered compulsory) for a director to try new visuals, new editing styles and to insert a little bit of dead time here and there purely for “effect”. When Mr Daniels was adding the dead time though, clearly the lid fell off the jar as it were. The first 10 minutes of the film, aside from the lengthy exposition (the combination of Macy Gray’s accent with rather iffy sound equipment made the narration nigh-on impossible to understand even for us native English speakers) there was a lot of emphasis on how Jack used to be a swimmer, and him “posing”. Clearly Mr Effron’s body made quite an impression as it is masqueraded throughout the film; it even gets its own little spotlight slap bang in the middle of a chase sequence (I mean, if there was any other point of cutting to memories of him swimming in the pool right when he was being chased by a murderer in a swamp do let me know, I am at a loss). But it’s not just that. The whole “superficiality” reduces a lot of emotion that we feel ought to be present in the film to mere surfaces. It is clear that Miss Bless puts more emphasis on her looks than her character for example. Fine, cinematic history is full of characters like that. But that reduces the chemistry that clearly exists between her and Jack to a kind of Barbie-Ken type relationship. This is a tad unfortunate because they are supposed to be the most important characters in the film. And once we fail to empathize with them, the film is pretty much lost.

And another thing. The editing is clearly inspired from 80’s – 90’s tv shows. There are effects in there I haven’t seen on a screen for over a decade. I realised as a I watched, there was a good reason for that. Now, it may be one of two things, either it is meant to further insert us into the period, or, the editing is just doing “all it can” to draw attention to itself.  This is a valid cinematic point, you know, the whole nouvelle vague message of not getting immersed in the film, the conscious viewer and all of that. However, taken in context I find this improbable. When we look at films like Precious or The Butler (for the last one I’m basing myself more on the trailer than anything else of course), while the filming styles are quite different, the aim is very much to tell the story. And Lee Daniels’ The Butler is already being earmarked for the Oscars ® in some circles which definitely says something about how “out there” and philosophical it is. No, if there was a consistent philosophical aim, I’m sure we would have seen it before…  So maybe it’s one of those days where you’re torn between a few different items of jewellery and end up wearing them all… And looking like a Christmas tree.

So I reckon The Paperboy is very much a missed opportunity. And to me, a clear lesson that a story can easily become the victim of the visual. There is a whole philosophical debate in there somewhere on which is the true “heart” of cinema, but I’ll leave that for another post. There are only so many tangents a blog post can take.