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Richard has hit a wall. This proverbial expression is no understatement, in fact, he can't seem to get past even the first sentence of his second novel, and his wife, Claire (Lisa Kudrow) - though we don't see it on screen - might just be celebrating far away from the Long Island cabin she drops him off in in the opening moments of writer-director team Michele and Kieran Mulroney's "Paper Man". For once, she won't have to supervise her husband, a baby trapped in a man's body. From there, Richard the floundering writer sets out, with inner chiming from his imaginary superhero alter-ego Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds), to draw inspiration from his bleak surroundings.
What - or rather, whom - he finds to feed this craving of perception, though is a girl named Abby (Emma Stone), and after a curious following of her around the back alleys of town on his bicycle, the girl agrees instantaneously to act as Richard's baby sitter. I know, I know, thematically this works, since Richard is the guy who needs babysitting in the first place. It's a metaphor, right? But when you're a girl who's literally just met a significantly older man out at random on the street, the tone might suggest something quite different. And when Richard later reveals to her after she shows up that there's in fact no baby to watch, well, that's probably your cue to swiftly exit the building. Supposing myself or any sensible girl growing up in the post-modern 9/11 age of "To Catch A Predator" or "Forensic Files" was Abby, Richard might not exactly be the kind of man you can bet on. But Abby stays. There's something so irresistibly mystifying about Richard, the story suggests. Yet anything more mystifying than Abby's naivete you'll be hard-pressed to find. "Paper Man" has no intentions of being a creepy slasher film, but with encounters like this, it sure sets us up for one.
Daniels, Emma Stone, Lisa Kudrow and the jocular Ryan Reynolds all put in good work here, in fact Stone shows real depth as Abby, the disillusioned and troubled teenager. She's convincing as the kind of girl whose wit and judiciousness puts her well beyond her years. But it's that fact that partially leaves us stupefied when she willingly puts herself at the romantic disposal of a complete and utter half-baked sleaze louse like that of Abby's boyfriend, Bryce. Stone is not opposite the frenzied comic timing of Jonah Hill or even the charm of Teddy Geiger that makes her character acting flow with a natural ease. Hunter Parrish plays Bryce with a stinking stupidity (Think of the obnoxious intrusiveness of one of the droogs from "A Clockwork Orange" who's too lazy to commit any violence), and while it's maybe the source of Abby's melancholy that tries to make, refraining from questioning her intellect can become a bit tiresome. When someone as charming, witty and vivacious as this is at the mercy of the sexual prowess of a buffoon, her independent spirit you're instructed to love sadly dissipates. As for the scenes with Reynolds, his superhero can be lively, perceptive and hilariously eccentric, if only he were simply given enough screen-time and were permitted to be released from the shackles of this narrative.
What the film aims to be, I think, is a dry, witty and intimate glimpse into the lives and souls of these misunderstood everyday people, but simply cannot connect; exemplified in this bit of dialogue: "If only everything in the world could be covered in butter", Richard remarks. "What a buttery world". What? We lean in from one interaction to the next, with the directors under the impression that with enough gestures, delivered either wryly or with yearning lament, that we will emerge with a wholly developed protagonist. Unfortunately it is lines that this that make it no wonder why Richard is doomed, indeed to remain so frustrated and misunderstood.
The problem is, writer-directors Michele and Kieran Mulroney don't seem to know these characters all that well, or perhaps that the film is too lazy to identify them, in spite of the statements the husband-and-wife filmmaker team may know they want to make. "Paper Man" has that fatal air of pretension, the kind that expects you almost instantly to understand each of its motivations and ideas while forgetting to develop them first. If Abby yearns for someone deeper than her spineless partner, I found myself asking, what is the purpose of her imaginary friend Christopher (Keiran Culkin, brother of Macaulay and Rory)? Or is he an extension of her unexamined feelings that Richard's literary work and mind can allow her to freely explore?
Such ideas certainly resonate with the enigmas of an estranged, struggling writer bashing his head repeatedly with frustration, and if that were the case, the film would be inspirational. Richard and Abby's unresolved problems in life seek to be thrashed out by Captain Excellent and Christopher, but instead they're mocked and bemoaned. This melancholy dominates "Paper Man", so much so that the relationships it projects feel empty, soldered together with nothing but moping and platonic commiserating.
Richard and Abby's paths through struggle both rely on the strength of their imaginations, with characters of their dreamed up subconscious functioning as a source of perseverance in times of crisis. We've seen this story before in a grittier, darker film like "Precious: Based On The Novel 'Push' by Sapphire", and it continues to be explored through taut psychological suspense like this year's "Shutter Island". Those films are horses of a different color, I'm aware, with vastly different ambitions, but those films nevertheless are identical in their choice of narrative, and where those films use an inspired premise as their catalysts in driving the narrative, "Paper Man" left me befuddled in the over-trusting of its performances to translate its undercooked moot points. While it's easy to acknowledge this is poised for good material, "Paper Man"'s watery script leaves us in a haze of unanswered questions, questions far more alluring than the stock phrase resolution it decides to crawl into.
As Richard prepares to write, Claire gives him some cautionary wisdom: "Don't fixate". On its subjects, "Paper Man" probably should have fixated a little more.
★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
Cast & Credits
Richard Dunne: Jeff Daniels Abby: Emma Stone Captain Excellent: Ryan Reynolds Claire Dunne: Lisa Kudrow Bryce: Hunter Parrish Christopher: Kieran Culkin
Artfire Films presents a film directed by Michele and Kieran Mulroney. Produced by Richard Gladstein, Guymon Casady, Art Spigel and Ara Katz. Running Time: 111 Minutes. Rated R (For Language and a Scene of Sexuality).
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Characterization within narrative contains a deep-rooted, almost pre-meditated quality. In films, as the tale of a singular character unfolds, it is as if we are adjusting the blinds covering a window, allowing the light to seep in little by little, in an eventual, seeping trajectory. As viewers, we may have never known initially that the depths of a character under the microscope pre-existed, and yet nevertheless they did all along. The course of their actions, their tendencies - their fate -mirror the intrinsic knowledge of their creator, they exist in one man, or woman’s universe. In essence, the effectuation of that universe attributes to filmmaking its disposition toward whomever is at the helm of the work. The reckoning that film is most precisely (though not limited to) a director’s medium is by no means an unfounded notion. Removing from the mundane, we are gripped by what compels, but more importantly, the enigmatic unknown that could strike at any moment in alarming and human ways.
We, the thinking, evolving audience yearn to empathize with real dilemmas – with the man who feels betrayed, the one who feels rejected, or even disgraced. Thus, the state in which well-crafted protagonists dwell is and should be wrenching in its truth, and their environment is often unapologetic. It comes to us as no shock, no surprise that oppressed souls, as they inhabit the seedy, draining, bloodsucking backdrop of the city streets seek refuge and solace in the pristine rapture of the fairer, subservient, assimilating sex.
More succinctly, in Martin Scorsese’s films, blonde, white women are heaven-sent. They are the air we breathe. They are the nurturing, understanding, submissive sub-humans they should be. They exist to entertain the self-referential reflections of the overtly masculine male, who relishes in covertly exploring his more delicate undercurrents. And yet such functions of femininity, even in their promotion, their support of peaceful, androgynous platitude of all good relationships, can only satisfy for so long. Their progression ceases, gobbled up in a paradox of the way in which their men incompetently understand them.
Scorsese’s women are fascinated with the world enough to be complacent, yes, but never enough to lay the groundwork, to innovate, to be liberated. Perhaps that’s what frustrates their male counterparts so severely, in their constrained efforts to dominate the microcosm in which they live.
Within the director’s version of their universe, soaked in suspicion, clouded in cynicism, Scorsese’s characters forge with a great deal of heart and spirit through their daily trappings. For “Who’s That Knocking At My Door”’s J.R., those boundaries are a life of crime. With the aid of a quintessential love interest, there is perhaps a righteous defiance in the time J.R. spends with her, a triumph of conscience over his private lifestyle, the one she knows nothing about. If not characteristic of the entirety of this work, Scorsese’s initial gravitation toward the script-relative title “I Call First” would have provided a cutting satirical commentary on the kind of hollow, overly saturated affection J.R. pours onto his love interest.
J.R.’s life behind closed doors - including nights of drunken, violent binges and perversely chauvinistic male camaraderie - reject any grain of purity in his pretensions.
That he courts his golden-haloed princess with showers of laughter and flirtatious innuendo, yet still finds room in his philosophy for the reduction of women he categorizes as either “girls” or “broads” limits his psyche to a distressed, volatile mistrust of the opposite sex, and it’s coupled with the kind of underlying insecurity that makes loving a woman in the real world theoretically impossible, and also potentially hazardous. Consequently, J.R.’s understanding of the small, male dominated subculture in which he operates sets the stage for the most manic pitfall of all: the quasi-Freudian and wholly anxiety ridden “Madonna - Whore Complex”.
J.R. acknowledges that there exists a cultural diffidence in the rat pack conduct he cultivates. The kind of after hours fare he and his company pull even with boyish glee is often harsh enough to necessitate a feminine tenderness. Coinciding with Mr. Scorsese's skewed directorial universe, the male lead's female complement - unfairly or not - has been previously assigned to alleviate his deviance both superficially and subconsciously, on his own terms.
J.R.'s criminality festers him with guilt on a religious level of commitment. The opposing opening and ending sequences of “Who’s That Knocking” play out much like a simplistic and essential blueprint of family life, with an off-base merging of devout Italian – American Catholicism and male dominated ethical norms that could make “Leave It To Beaver” look progressive on a relative scale. J.R.’s illusion – or delusion – of this kind of consummate Americanism is what fuels the passion of his pursuits, and allows him to be sufficient in projecting his love on a woman.
What is inevitable, however, is the snap. As their relationship gradually builds, the girl, like most women, becomes comfortable in her vulnerability. As a passage into a heightened level of sentiment and intimacy, she then exposes a raw and unadulterated aspect of herself that becomes too much for his provincial small-mindedness. In J.R.’s case, it is his girlfriend’s revelation of a dark, disturbing secret that triggers an almost psychotic reaction. Upon discovering (through a cathartic confession not at all different his own church confessionals) that his girlfriend has been raped, J.R. instantly casts her out. He may possess for her strong love, and even dependency, yet tragically his world is crushed to pieces with the compromising of any of his cherished male codes of presumption.
Scorsese further distinguishes “the snap” triggered by female roles via his character study of “Taxi Driver”’s Travis Bickle, with even higher stakes. This film, in many ways is about that snap. For Travis, his absorption of the low-lives and scum of New York City is his living nightmare. Like J.R. invests an undeserving and unrealistic hope in his girlfriend to “save” him from the perils of a life of crime, Travis bets his hand on an “unspoken connection” with the blonde-haired siren Betsy to ease his deranged radicalism toward a society comprised of people with which his wildly fanatical principles cannot bear to co-exist .
Much to his misfortune, he is almost surreally overbearing in his efforts to court her, and when she rightfully rejects him, the pain that follows becomes a tragic arch in his journey in which he becomes fully unhinged.
“She’s just like the rest of them”, Travis says, “Cold and distant”. Perhaps the most upsetting and disturbing thought is that upon Travis’ rejection - from the moment Betsy hangs up the phone – she has made it easy for him to turn hostile toward those he detests and fails to understand. The simple act of rejection has now sealed the threat of violence, in a character arc designed to cement the fate of the victims that will die at Travis’ hand. That violence that Travis will infamously turn against his enemy is unmistakably displaced by his inability to accept that women, like men are not perfect. They are flawed, and with good reason – they’re human. It’s a concept that doesn’t quite jibe with Travis, and likewise bloodshed ensues.
Jake “Raging Bull” La Motta’s blonde, subservient belle Vickie is often the catalyst of violence in the 1980 film; again we are delving into a study of character territory that is familiar but richened in its willing to go to extremes to illustrate just how far the animosity of a man can go when constrained by the ailments of his protocol of self-subscribed, overkill robustness. Jake is constantly inquisitive of his wife’s behavior, which is almost always, if not always modest and innocent. His expression of violence in the ring is abrasive and visceral, it certainly evokes response; Scorsese presents Jake’s outbursts as the same type of self-loathing despair Travis experiences, consistently categorized by his inadequacy to see his woman as anything more or less than a servicing object who’s either an angelic mute who indulges sexual prowess and coddles Jake’s fluctuating state of inner-child, or a perverse and untrustworthy slut. To this degree, Jake’s visual associations can morph the most conventional of gestures – like the kissing of a friend or acquaintance on the cheek as greeting – into a whorish romp.
The fact that Jake’s conviction of his wife’s deviance has an infectious rhetoric to it is perhaps even more sickening. Jake’s brother Joey (Joe Pesci) himself inhibits a similar disposition and mistreatment so intensely that it ventures off into comedic, satirical territory. Joey watches his brother perform this sado-masichist exercise of suspicion every second of every day, and we learn that even his otherwise decent sensibility can take a turn. As a reflexive film, "Raging Bull" returns constantly to those types of scenes, with mistreatment and violence at its core, ready to be celebrated, transfixed, or used to further these characters.
In this scene, as Joey demeans his wife in front of his brother at their kitchen table, he is no doubt shaped by and acting out the influence of his brother Jake’s disregarding of anything wholesome in his spouse.
The disdain for the mere notion of equity and embrace within the gender dynamic, the inheritance of a fallacy of intimate relations, passion without sympathy. Isn’t that more disgusting than the violence itself?
