by Jason Adams
Weirdly conservative and as profound as a midnight tweet-storm during a Dexedrine binge, I give you (no seriously, take it away from me) actor B.J. Novak’s writer/director debut Vengeance. This feels like a movie that Elon Musk will just absolutely adore... and please never defile my memory by thinking I mean that as a compliment. A wannabe Coens-esque satire of red-state/blue-state warfare and the champagne simps caught in the middle, Vengeance ultimately reads like a love letter to "Both Sides"-ism that ventures nothing so gains a great plains worth of nothing in bold-type return...
In addition to writing and directing, Novak (The Office) stars as Ben Manalowitz, a douchebag writer for The New Yorker who’s besties with John Mayer and who has his own smug catchphrases. Ben is the sorta brah who can’t go a day without entering another forgettable girl into his cellphone under a pseudonym like “Texas,” because she’s from Texas... Clever boy, that Ben! Early on there’s a lot of coked-up-sounding prattle that’s meant to convince us this Ben fella has big ideas, none of which the movie side-eyes enough. He lacks focus, sure, but there’s something there. Vengeance inexplicably believes this so fully that it casts the genuinely brilliant Issa Rae in the thankless role of Ben’s friend Eliose, a podcast producer who’s forced to sit and nod and frozen-smile and thereby lend credence to all of his teenage-matured bullshit.
One dark and drunken night that hook-up "Texas” (Lio Tipton) turns up dead. We learn here that her name was Abilene and that her entire family believed Ben to be her boyfriend. It’s all played sitcom-kooky, up to and including the Oklahoma-wide suspension of disbelief required to believe what happens next -- namely that Ben would jump on a series of ever-smaller airplanes to head to Middle-of-no-place, Texas, for Abilene’s funeral.
Indeed "sitcom-kooky" comes back to bite Vengeance in its back-pocket more than once, especially as we meet Abilene’s family of broad flyover stereotypes. Brother Ty (Boyd Holbook) is all good-ol-boy hair-triggered hotness who’s convinced Abilene was murdered, and that t'weren’t the drug-overdose the cops called it to be! It only takes minutes of knowing one another for Ty to start selling his plot to Ben from the front seat of that dusty pick-up truck. They will seek vengeance (excuse me, Vengeance) for the death of Abilene, the innocent pretty dead white girl of every man’s dreams. Cue Q-conspiracies and maps covered with red string. For his part Ben, seeing himself as the hetero answer to Truman Capote himself, looks down at those warbled sentiments of In Cold Blood at the pick-up’s floor and hatches himself a 21st-Century version -- a podcast, of course!
Vengeance tries very very hard to up-end our culture’s true-crime obsessions as it plugs along -- Ben’s original title for his podcast is “Dead White Girl” for one. But in the end Vengeance ends up being another ode to a straight man’s journey towards the revelation that 'hey, women are people too.'
Not just women, actually, but all of those Red-Staters as well. Vengeance constantly thinks it’s proving something through the world’s least revealing rug-pulls. Things like, "Hey Abilene’s sister knows how to use the internet!" Or, "Hey Abilene’s little brother (nicknamed 'El Stupido') is kinda sweet." We're meant to be astonished by the authenticity that Ben comes to see underneath the stereotypes, but the script doesn’t give these peple any more depth than quick-dry puddles in the desert. Obviously casting someone as immensely talented as J. Smith-Cameron to play Abilene’s mother goes a long way, but the movie doesn’t give her anything to push from those soulful eyes here buried beneath a Jon-Benet hairdo. These are just sitcom characters, but sitcom characters from a show’s second or third season. (It’s like how we eventually come to understand that Cosmo Kramer got his GED instead of graduating from high school.)
The film’s sinister voice of reason is a smarty-pants music producer in a cowboy hat played by Ashton Kutcher, and as much as the film clearly knows what I just wrote is a punch-line, it also kind of ultimately doesn’t? Secrets about police ineptitude and shifting state lines, the opioid epidemic and the big cartel business, and that weathered-down cow’s skull called “The American Dream,” all get play in Kutcher’s post-truth monologuing, and it’s all meant to hammer nails into the coffin of our country’s discontent. And yet even though I know this movie would have a good laugh at my expense for saying it, it’s hard not to just be genuinely exhausted by the straight white man skeleton rattling under this movie’s skin.