What caused 17-year-old Ricky Wershe to be sentenced to life in prison? Well, if you know the story, the easy answer is drugs. If, on the other hand, you've seen White Boy Rick, you know that many factors played into his doom including poverty, crime, and a seemingly amoral police investigation. Of course it's a fascinating story, and one that seems ready-made for a crime serial on cable or even an awards-grabbing film.
Unfortunately, Yann Demange's new film falls cold and flat like the snow covering 1980s Detroit. Though the film's sense of place and socioeconomic class is clearly well-researched and detailed, almost nothing about it allows the audience to connect. The story, written with bizarre tonal shifts and no real character development, stitches together disparate episodes in Rick's life to try and make sense of his downward spiral. While this tactic may have worked in a miniseries, here it serves to disorient. We're not quite sure what we're seeing or why we're seeing it, and when we are sure we can't say why it's important or why we should care.
The characters are wholly unlikable, not helped by the understated actors, almost all of whom feel as inconsequential as their characters. Instead of caring about the considerable drama inherent in the story, I found myself engaged only because of the costumes and lighting. Admittedly, I thus bought into the film on its terms of -- you guessed it -- poverty porn. It pulls at your heartstrings to see Rick's father (Matthew McConaughey) dreaming about opening a video store with his family to make it big, when we know full well that in less than 20 years video stores will all but disappear. It pulls at something (though not perhaps such a sentimental organ) to see Rick's sister (Bel Powley) succumb to a life of drugs and sex. Then, between the glum, manipulative cops (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Rory Cochrane, and Brian Tyree Henry) and the obnoxious, ailing grandparents (Bruce Dern and Piper Laurie), there's not much room for sympathy with anybody.
The film plods along, not sure if it wants to be a period piece or character study, lurching from deeply saturated hedonistic party scenes of drugs and dancing to starkly bare images of crumbling houses and drugs deals and violence. Its most interesting aspects -- the ambiguous role of cops and their sudden betrayal of Ricky, their youngest informant -- don't arrive until late in the picture, when we neither care why it happened or what will happen next. Additionally, the relatively open ending would be more appropriate for a documentary than a feature film, and so White Boy Rick feels like a mess attempt to preach something. Too bad its message wasn't aimed at something higher than failed sentiment, ruined sympathy, and problematic snapshots of desperate lives.
IMDb: White Boy Rick
No comments:
Post a Comment