Movie Review: Damsel

Damsel ** / *****

Directed by: David & Nathan Zellner.

Written by: David & Nathan Zellner.

Starring: Robert Pattinson (Samuel Alabaster), Mia Wasikowska (Penelope), David Zellner (Parson Henry), Nathan Zellner (Rufus Cornell), Joseph Billingiere (Zachariah Running Bear), Robert Forster (Old Preacher).

 

Damsel is one of those movies that seeks to deconstruct the genre it is a part of – but once you figured out what it’s trying to do, there’s much else of interest there. The ideas in the film are good – the performances are better, and cinematography capturing the vast, dusty plains if the old West are even better. And yet, it’s tough not to get the sense that this could have been a killer 30 minute short, but stretched out to nearly two hours, it’s more of a languid bore that anything else. You want to like it, because it’s clever and got its heart in the right place – it just never really gets off the ground. It’s a bad sign when the opening scene in the best in the movie – and also the only scene featuring the most interesting character in the whole film (played by Robert Forrester) – who leaves more on an impression than anyone else.

 

Damsel is a Western starring Robert Pattinson as Samuel Alabaster, a strange little man, who convinces Parson Henry (David Zellner) – who is just pretending to be a Parson – to come with him on a journey so that Samuel can marry his Honey Bun (he has a song about her) – Penelope (Mia Wasikowska). Samuel doesn’t tell Parson Henry a lot about this journey before hand – including that it will be a journey at all or that Penelope has been kidnapped and is being held by a man of pure evil. When we finally meet Penelope – half way through the movie – there’s even more differences. I won’t spoil much, but I will say she is not the Damsel in distress we are expecting. All the men in the movie insist on seeing her as that – but she doesn’t need rescuing. She’s the strongest, most self-reliant person in the film – and in her way, she pays for that as well.

 

The movie is split pretty much right down the middle – with Parson Henry being the constant between the halves. In the first half, Parson Henry is with Samuel, in the second, Penelope. In both halves, writers/directors the Zellner brothers delight in upending our expectations in the genre. Pattison gradually proves himself to be less and less of the typical Western hero than we expect him to be – and his introduction involves him and a miniature horse named Butterscotch, which means from the start you know something is off about him. The best scene in the movie – other than that opening – happens when Samuel and Penelope finally coming face to face halfway through the movie – and we understand exactly who both of them are. From there, it’s mainly confirmed that again and again. This does Wasikowska no favors, as we pretty much know everything we need to know about her in that scene – and then spend an hour just reconfirming that again and again.

 

I will say the performances are both very good. I have admired the career trajectory of Robert Pattinson – who has picked one interesting filmmaker after another to work with since the end of the Twilight series (David Cronenberg – twice, James Gray, David Michod, the Safdie brothers, Claire Denis) and he has pushed himself in those films, and sometimes been brilliant (he should have won an Oscar for Good Time). This is an odd performance – broad, yet specific, funny, strange and disturbing all at once. He has the opposite disadvantage that Wasikowska has – in that he has to hold back some things until that scene with her, and there’s nowhere really for the character to go. Wasikowska has always been best when playing strong, independent women – and she does that admirably here as well. You just wish the Zellners had something more interesting for her to do than roll her eyes as one asshole man after another assumes they know what’s best for her, that they want to protect her (fuck her is more likely) and are basically one step away from saying that they’re “nice guys” and don’t understand why women like her don’t like them.

 

The film though just never quite comes together – unlike the very strange Kumiko the Treasure Hunter, the last Zellner movie, which was as odd as this, but also had a more cohesive outlook. Damsel is a strange film. I just wish it was a more interesting one too.

Movie Review: Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter
Directed by: David Zellner.
Written by: David Zellner and Nathan Zellner.
Starring: Rinko Kikuchi (Kumiko), Nobuyuki Katsube (Sakagami), Shirley Venard (Older Woman), David Zellner (Policeman), Nathan Zellner (Robert), Kanako Higashi (Michi).

The Coen Brothers Fargo (1996), is one of the best films ever made – and more than any of the brothers other films, represents the portrait of what they call “Minnesota nice” – which runs through a lot of their work. Minnesota nice refers to the gap between how the people in Minnesota appear on the surface, and what they are underneath – which is just as greedy, selfish and violent as anyone else, even if it’s wrapped up in a lot of funny sounding “aw, shucks” and “Oh, gees”. Pretty much everyone in Fargo appears like a nice guy – and yet they’re almost all shits as well.

From another pair of filmmaking brothers – the Zellners – now comes Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, which quite literally starts with the exact same shot as the Coens’ Fargo does – as the first shot of the movie is on a TV, playing an old VHS copy of Fargo, freeze framed on the opening title card announcing that “This is a True Story” – something the Coens’ eventually admitted they made up, because they thought it would sound better. Unlike Fargo however, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter really is based (however loosely) on a True Story – that of  a lonely Japanese woman, who believes that opening title card in Fargo, and comes to America in the dead of winter in search of all that money Steve Buscemi buried next to a fence, alongside a highway in the Coens’ movie. It doesn’t go well for her.

Before Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) even gets to America however, the Zellners’ spend a lot of time with her in Japan – where her life isn’t going well anyway. She has got a dead end job, for a boss who is too lazy to fire her, although he does wonder why, at 29, she’s still working there. All the other women either get married and leave, or else advance in their careers – and Kumiko has no desire to do either. There are a series of phone calls with her mother – who is constantly wondering why she hasn’t gotten either a promotion or else engaged. A chance encounter with an old friend at least hints that at one point Kumiko may not have been this anti-social. A scene with her bunny – named Bunzo – is so sad, awkward and hilarious all at once, that the Coens’ themselves would have be proud of it.

From there, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter moves to the Minnesota/North Dakota of the Coen brothers movie – and has Kumiko meet up with a series of eccentric characters, who, on the surface at least, would fit in well in a Coen movie. But whereas the Coens like to expose their hypocrisy – the greed beneath the surface, the Zellners take a more genuine approach. The people she meets – many of whom are nice enough to stop by the side of the road and pick up a lonely, cold stranger – may be a little bit weird – but they are genuinely nice, and do try and help Kumiko. An old woman gives her a place to stay, instead of having to be outside in the cold, a cop tries to convince her that Fargo is just a movie, buys her a meal, and takes her to get a coat – and doesn’t expect anything in return. If Kumiko’s trip ends with inevitable tragedy, that isn’t because of these people who are unfeeling or unkind – but because Kumiko herself is too far gone to be saved.

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter is an odd movie to say the least. It moves at a slow pace, and if you don’t get on its weird wavelength, it’s likely going to feel much longer than its 105 minute runtime. Kikuchi delivers yet another brilliant, largely silent performance (she did the same thing in both Babel and The Brothers Bloom – once in drama, once in comedy) – here delivering a portrait of mental illness too far gone, too committed to her beliefs, and unwilling to hear he truth, to be saved. The film is also wonderfully shot – one of those rare movies that makes the cold palpable (something Fargo did as well).
 

Yet as odd as the films gets – and its gets really, really odd in the final minutes – it never loses it connection with its title character – who really does make the movie. She is an odd character to build a movie around, which is perhaps why it works so well. The film is ultimately about a woman who dooms herself – and yet we never lose sympathy for her. That’s a hard trick to pull off, but this movie does it.