Nobody's Good In This Movie, Be They Crazy Or Smart

Because I didn't bother to read the back of the DVD case before I started watching Nobel Son, it was not what I expected. I was figuring it would have a kid struggling to find his place. Then he meets a girl who helps it all make sense, and maybe he and his parents find common ground, and maybe not. I wasn't expecting that in the first five minutes I'd see both a man's thumb lopped off with a meat cleaver, and Alan Rickman's O-face. Not sure which was more unwelcome, actually.

Rickman plays Eli, an insufferable, philandering jackass of a chemist, who is guaranteed to only become more insufferable now that he's won the Nobel Prize. His son Bradley, who is a disappointment to Eli because he's pursuing a PhD in anthropology with a focus on cannibalism, works up the nerve to talk to a girl at a poetry reading (City/Sharon Hall, as played by Eliza Dushku), spends the night with her, then is kidnapped as he tries to catch up to his parents, who have already left for Stockholm. The kidnapper is Eli's illegitimate son, from an affair with the wife of one of Eli's chemistry buddies from the '70s, whose work Eli stole and passed off as his own (and is what earned him the Nobel). From there we have double-crosses, double-crosses of the double-crossers, what I would consider improbable car assembly sequences, more kidnapping, people being committed, and either a death or a suicide by Danny DeVito. It looks like a suicide, but I'm not positive that's not a set-up, since the original kidnapper, Thaddeus, was talking to him in the scene prior, and at the very least, put DiVito in a fragile enough state of mind to do it.

I don't know what to think about the ending. A couple of characters probably get the ends they deserve, but since practically everyone gets in on the double-crossing eventually, I have a hard time thinking more people didn't deserve bad ends. Which is strange. I don't normally have a problem with protagonists turning the tables on their opponents, like in High Plains Drifter. The difference is I don't think the Stranger went on to some happy life after he finished wrecking the people of Lago, while some of the characters in Nobel Son clearly will. They're wealthy, living in tropical beach paradises or having relationships with people they actually like, and it seems wrong. They don't show any real doubts about what they're doing, so I have a hard time believing the "good guys" are any better than the "bad guys". If they had been focused solely on setting things straight and bringing the bad guys to justice, a happy ending would have been fine, a proper reward for a good job. They seem out to profit from the whole thing as much as the criminals.

There's a line Bradley uses twice in the film. Roughly, it says eating the dead isn't evil, it's recycling. What's evil is to eat a man alive. I think it's supposed to refer to Eli, since he needs people around him to feel better about himself. Whether it's from them stroking his ego, or making him feel wanted by having sex with him, or him bolstering his own self-image by putting them down (which he does constantly, to almost everyone). He takes what people have, their self-esteem, self-worth, and destroys it in service of himself. At the very end, he's initially alone in a classroom, and he seems almost thoughtful, and I thought perhaps he'd learned something. Then one of his female students came in to ask him a question, and he started making moves on her, so he's still evil, I guess.

I wonder if Bradley is any better, though. He used his mother's (Mary Steenburgen as Sarah) concern for him to make the initial ransom demands work, because he wasn't certain his dad actually cared. Still, he's using affection she gives freely, while putting her through hell, as she didn't know where he was, if he was safe or not, how calculating or sloppy his kidnapper was. She's clearly under strain, to the point when a newslady on her lawn calls the house wanting a statement, Sarah draws a revolver from a desk drawer, aims it at the reporter through the window, and tells her to get off the lawn before Sarah blows her head off. Bradley is just excited about getting his money and sticking it to his father. Maybe he figures it's OK since he'll be coming home, and he'll be fine, but he really does spare much thought for what he put Sarah through/ Seems at least a little evil to me.

There's one other exchange that struck, when Bradley visits City late in the film, and tells her we all make choices. City responds that some times the choices are made for us. I wonder who wasn't making their own choices. Eil, as far as we know, definitely was. Is the movie arguing that based on the person Eli was, Bradley, Thaddeus, and Sarah didn't have a choice, that they could only respond the way they could? His belittling of Sarah and Bradley, his disregard for Thaddeus brought things to the place they were, and so there was only one path to take? I think there were enough other ways to approach things (Sarah divorces Eli long ago, Thaddeus approaches Eli directly, shows his udnerstanding of chemistry, forms their bond honestly, Bradley accepts his father is a dick, goes on with his life, and when he's able to strike out on his own, cuts Eli out of the equation directly), that I can't go along with it.

I don't think George (DeVito's character) made his own choice. I think his OCD (with at least a small nudge from Thaddeus, if not more) made his last decision. I'm inclined to place City in the same category. She seems to be on her own wavelength most of the time, and I really feel like she's being guided by Thaddeus a lot. When she's herself, she tends to speak in poetry, and everyone around her is just confused. It's like Thaddeus has her on a script, except she can't stay on it, and sometimes the ad-libbing works (around Bradely, who is infatuated with her), and sometimes it doesn't. I don't have a sense she's actively shaping things.

I can't recommend it, certainly not as a purchase, though if you can rent it cheaply enough (you'll have to decide what that means), you could give it a whirl. Maybe it'll appeal to you more than it did to me.