The story was strangely fascinating for people who
follow weird-news sources like Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading
Room: a woman driving at night had struck a homeless pedestrian with
such force that he tumbled headlong over the hood of the car and
straight through the windshield so that his body slumped across the
dashboard, impaled on the shattered glass underneath it. Amazingly,
the woman kept driving. She drove all the way home and stashed the
car in her garage, where she left him to bleed for death.
(Authorities said that if the woman had sought help after the
accident, he probably would have lived.) Finally, she sought the help
of friends to dispose of the body and ruined, blood-stained car.
The whole sequence of events seemed
unlikely, but there it was. The story had the whiff of sensationalism
about it, but the facts seemed to check out. Just reading about it
was infuriating, but I remember spending a lot of time mulling it
over, trying to figure out what state of mind that woman had to be
in. How tweaked did your brain have to be before it would allow you
to ignore an ongoing tragedy of your making? How invested in your own
self-interest do you have to be to shut out a death in slow motion
that only you are witness to?>
Stuart Gordon, not just a master of
neo-Lovecraftian horror but also a director of impressively dark
comedies, saw a film in the material. Gordon had a reputation as a
provocative theater director before he splattered onto the film scene
with Re-Animator, an impressively gross, tongue-in-cheek adaptation
of a story by H.P. Lovecraft boasting one of the best sick sex jokes
in film history, a signature performance by Jeffrey Combs as the
Frankenstein-like title character, Herbert West, and an apparent
claim to fame in terms of the sheer quantity of its bloodshed. (As
Gordon tells the story, he believed his production held the record
for gallons of fake blood expended until he met up with Peter
Jackson, who informed him that his own zombie comedy, Braindead, aka
Dead Alive, had bested it by two orders of magnitude.) Gordon had his
ups and downs as a genre filmmaker, but in recent years he had been
working at extending his range into sardonic character drama. In that
regard, the unpleasant Edmond, which starred William H. Macy in an
engaging turn as a difficult character, was something of a
breakthrough.
But Stuck is something else entirely —
it’s an energetic B-movie with pulpy magnetism. Think of it as
slapstick social realism. Mena Suvari, also listed as a co-producer,
stars as Brandi. Sporting a big, round forehead, an imperfect
complexion, and an intricate network of cornrows winding across her
scalp, she’s an appealingly unassuming protagonist. She’s introduced
in the film’s very first sequence, in which incongruous hip-hop music
thumps and rumbles on the soundtrack as accompaniment to images of
the tired and bewildered looking residents of an old-folks home where
Brandi works as a nurse, cheerfully cleaning up feces-smeared linens
and brown-nosing her way toward a promotion - the thankless
overtime duty and general ass-kissing involved just comes with the
territory. Shortly thereafter, we meet Stephen Rea as Tom, a
downsized management type who manages, just, to scramble out of his
apartment with one good suit as his landlord evicts him. (Gordon’s
major misstep is the introduction here of a gentle black character — too
broadly written and baldly symbolic of the established but unseen
American underclass, though perhaps he’s meant as an ironic invocation of the “magical negro” stereotype — who kindly lends Tom the shopping cart that
serves as a sort of Charon’s boat into the underworld.)
Brandi celebrates her good fortune at
work by getting hammered on a Friday night and driving home under the
influence. Newly homeless Tom wanders the streets aimlessly after
being rousted from a park bench by an unfriendly cop. And that’s
where these two worlds collide.
What ensues is a very dark comedy
about, mostly, Brandi’s take on events. (Poor Tom, impaled on
nasty-looking shard of broken glass, has a fixed and limited
perspective on the goings-on.) She treats the incident first as a
minor inconvenience that she has to ignore in order to stay sharp
when she heads in to work on a Saturday. When she realizes Tom is
still alive, the problem begins to gnaw at her, but instead of
summoning help she opts to protect herself by appealing to boyfriend
Rashid to give Tom an extra push into the hereafter.
There’s nothing pretty about Stuck, an
attribute that goes a long way toward establishing street cred. As
B-movie directors increasingly migrate toward the clean, modern look
of HD, this has a genuine low-budget film look, and its cocktail of
sex, gore and comedy is a tasty recipe that’s rarely served up these
days. A dust-up between Brandi and Rashid that begins with the tiny,
ferocious Brandi ejecting a nude woman from Rashid’s bed isn’t just a
funny scene, but also an illustration of how she’s directing all the
emotional energy that she’s not expending on empathy for her
hit-and-run victim. And the painful closeups of Tom’s squirm-inducing
injuries aren’t just money shots for genre fans, but important
grounding points for a story about suffering, and the deliberate
ignorance of the suffering of others.
Brandi is something of a monster, yes,
but that’s not to say Gordon doesn’t have some sympathy for her.
He’s clearly interested in the gap between her aptitude with her
patients and her callousness toward this bloody stranger. She’s also
under exploitative pressure from her smugly condescending boss, who
dangles the suggestion of a promotion in front of her just to see how
far she’ll reach for it. But the fix that both Brandi and Tom find
themselves in is the product of economic disadvantage — of her
upward struggle toward a paycheck that can help make ends meet, and
of the sudden downward mobility that put him out on the street in the
first place. (The problems of the immigrant family living next door
without documentation figure in as well.)
Yet this character has a great
selfishness and sense of entitlement that eventually makes her fun to
hate, and Gordon and Suvari both have a ball putting her through her
paces. Of course, once the badly crippled Tom gathers his strength
and his wits, Stuck turns into a bloody metaphor for life on the mean
streets of contemporary America, where youth and callow ambition are
having it out with age, grit and experience in a struggle for
opportunity. It’s the horror movie that our recessionary times
deserve. A-