MICHEL GONDRY NEEDS to get Charlie Kaufman on the phone, pronto. The two collaborations between the French director and American screenwriter have produced films (2001’s Human Nature and 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) that journey to the great beyond without getting lost, because their fantastical narratives provide commentaries on human truths cleverly masked by sparkling wit. But Kaufman didn’t script Gondry’s last foray into untamed whimsy, 2006’s The Science of Sleep, nor his latest, Be Kind Rewind — Gondry did, and the result is the same: another visually inventive but thematically brain-dead disaster.
The premise rests on our ability to accept that a video rental store still exists, and that we should care about its survival in the era of DVDs, a gimmick that might’ve worked at the dawn of the digital age, but which now comes off as weirdness for its own sake. According to its owner, Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover, sporting a mini-‘fro and a grating lisp), the store, called Be Kind Rewind, occupies the building where a legendary jazz pianist (Mos Def, who also plays the lead) regularly performed. Mr. Fletcher also claims the city in which it’s located, Passaic, N. J., was once the jazz capital of the world, a tall tale his surrogate son and the store’s clerk, Mike (Mos Def), readily accepts.
Gondry wants the place to have a history, so we, too, fear for its future as the evil Blockbuster-style joint across the way sucks up all its business by offering DVDs and a group of developers battle to have it condemned. We don’t, of course, but just in case, Gondry takes this absurd set-up a couple more credulity-stretching steps further. When Mr. Fletcher ostensibly goes on vacation (he’s really spying on his competition — ha!), leaving Mike in charge of the store, Mike’s loopy pal Jerry (a scenery-chomping Jack Black) goes and gets himself electrified, and then accidentally erases all the videos’ content with his new-found magnetic powers. Oh, what to do?
If you’re a director who belies his music video roots with every line of dialogue, you have Mike and Jerry enlist the help of a cashier (Melonie Diaz) to shoot their own poor-quality versions of the films once in stock. Then you inexplicably dub the process “sweding” and win over tons of new costumers, who line up to rent these dime-store renditions of Driving Miss Daisy, Ghostbusters and the like. The day is saved, until some more evildoers show up and claim copyright infringement. What to do again?
Try walking out.
Critics who’ve praised Gondry’s movie fall all over themselves trying to interpret it. They call it an examination of the filmmaking process, a dissection of the relationship between filmmakers and audiences, and some other meta-crap, even as they admit they’re not sure which interpretation is “correct.” What we really have here, however, is plain old bad writing. Gondry has a wonderful eye (after Jerry’s electrification, for example, Gondry literally zaps the screen with shockwaves periodically to mirror Jerry’s condition), but his storytelling sense is like a child’s understanding of sex: The facts are obscured by an overactive imagination and lack of experience. Pick up, Kaufman. Your director needs you.
Be Kind Rewind
Mos Def, Jack Black, Danny Glover. Directed by Michel Gondry.
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