wri. Nicholas Kazan and Stephen Gyllenhaal
running time: 1 hour 35 minutes
st. Billy Bob Thornton, Kelly Lynch, Hank Azaria, John Lithgow, Ryan Phillippe, Ted Danson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jon Tenney, Judge Reinhold and Jon Bon Jovi
This has been a bad year for film. And why not? This is the age of formula substitution. As Max says in Strange Days, everything that can be done, has been done. It's the end of the millenium, the end of the world, and we seem to have run out of ideas. Movies based on Actual Events ("I can fly, Jack!"), movies based on other (invariably French) films, movies based on television series, movies basically engaged in a wholesale consumption and regurgitation and reregurgitation of itself and everything else, with nothing new to come. Get into your bunkers, people. It's the end of film.Homegrown does little to refute this current trend. We can at least be thankful for the lack of pseudo grunge gen-Xers usually associated with this weed, ones who sit around talking about... what was that advertising mantra again? "Life, love, sex and drugs". Oh. Very daring.
Unfortunately, in place of that formula is another, copying the classic Treasure of the Sierra Madre. From this formula, semidigested in the alchemical bile of late 20th century popular culture and consequently neither new nor an original reworking of the Sierra Madre idea, emerges a tired movie involving North Californian marijuana growers, who are older, less beautiful and only marginally more interesting than thirty-something university students. Although these individual elements are original by themselves, they are presented unoriginally, as if someone chose to use the highest technologies to paint an exact replica of the Mona Lisa.
This rigid play-by-numbers becomes painfully obvious throughout the film. Ted Danson's turn as the mob boss Gianni shrieks 'indie device' with his soap operatic malevolence and conveniently ironic ('quirky') occupation - toy factory owner. Bon Jovi's soporific performance as the drug dealer Danny is the insomniac's Holy Grail, while John Lithgow displays his quality as a thespian by expressing all of the emotions from A to B, accompanied with his usual repertoire of exaggerated facial contortions and hand flapping, his arms akimbo. In those Parkinsonistic hands, the enigmatic, eccentric plantation owner Malcolm Stockman and his brother Robert are reduced to camp versions of... John Lithgow.
In fact, the less we see of the cameos, the more enigmatically fluent they seem to be. Judge Reinhold's corrupt policeman and Jamie Lee Curtis' commune mother exemplify director Gyllenhaal's carefree approach. It helps that the short length that they spend on screen reduce their performances to amusing vignettes and not Bon Jovi's boredom torture sessions.
It is Billy Bob Thornton who nearly singlehandedly drags the movie back from the brink against the tide of bad acting. As Jack, Thornton seamlessly combines a peculiarly American buddy buddy friendliness with a dangerously charismatic mystery, the perfect picture of a hick weed farmer undergoing an attempted metamorphosis into an underworld entrepeneur. Kelly Lynch's Lucy also displays a believable duplicity, at once femme fatale and innocent doe. Their exemplary performances add to Gyllenhaal's attempted filmic translation of marijuana induced paranoia, which are at times hampered by his frustratingly unnecessary use of cheap & cheesy horror movie effects - the climactic music of red herrings, the shots of anonymous vehicles. It isn't hard to believe that this is the man who squeezed the most out of Heather Locklear.
Hank Azaria, a regular Simpsons voice, is light comic relief at its best, while Ryan Phillipe, who played the boyish bastard in the superfluous teenybopper hit I Know What You Did Last Summer, gives a competent if somewhat patchy performance as Harlan, a character who never quite manages to integrate the two sides of his personality. Like Harlan, Homegrown tries to be funny, smart and artful. And, like Harlan, it only conceals a superficial and irritating shallowness.
huan-tzin goh
comments? email the author