|
Strained comedy makes well-meaning indie go ‘Kabluey’
Two ideas vie for attention in Scott Prendergast’s ambitious little indie, Kabluey. On one level, it’s an analogy of fractured modern culture, so disrupted by war and other social and financial pressures that we all feel reduced to ineffectual helplessness. It also desperately wants to be another quirky comedy in the Napoleon Dynamite mold about dysfunctional family members struggling for connection.It’s not that these two ideas can’t co-exist; the best comedy always involves an element of tragedy, or at least pathos. It’s just a matter of skill. Occasional moments of emotion do sometimes ring true amid the sight gags and determined silliness, but Prendergast, in his rookie feature, fails to construct a funny enough comedy framework to make the whole engine go. And what little reality is allowed to percolate into Prendergast’s design bears so little resemblance to the way real life works that the big picture is constantly getting tripped up over irritating little details. Leslie (Lisa Kudrow) is a frazzled mother in a suburban tract neighborhood. Her National Guardsman husband has been deployed in Iraq for a year and a half. Her two little hellion boys run riot, and if she doesn’t to back to work soon, she’ll lose their health insurance, as well as her mind. Her mother-in-law insists on sending out Leslie’s 32-year-old, sad-sack, perpetually underemployed brother-in-law, Salman (played by Prendergast) to provide live-in child care. Salman is the family screw-up, with no particular talent, dreams, or personality. He’s amenable; he’ll try his best to do whatever is asked of him, he’s just never developed the life skills to cope with, well, anything. Not only do his devil-spawn nephews run amok, the eldest (who watches way too many violent video games and Iraqi war news reports) starts threatening to kill him. After only a few miserable days, Leslie sends Salman on a job interview at her office (child care suddenly no longer an issue), a failing tech firm called BlueNexion in an empty industrial park. The job has Salman suiting up as the company mascot in a blue plush costume with a huge round, faceless head and no opposable digits, like a giant Keith Haring figure. His purpose is to hand out fliers advertising office space for rent in the BlueNexion building. But not only does his costume provide no hands with which to grip the fliers, he’s stationed out on a lonely two-lane highway in the middle of a corn field, instead of on a busy urban street corner with plenty of foot traffic. The movie is riddled with these strange inconsistencies. (Like, doesn’t the military provide health care for families of servicemen on active duty? A work gang from the jail picking up roadside litter are not only unsupervised, they hand Salman a beer.) None of which would matter if Prendergast created actual humor from these elements. But too many shots depend on the viewer finding the blue suit inherently funny in its own right, and too many gags involve Salman’s groping hand sticking out of provocatively placed zippers in the suit. Emotionally, the story is more premise than payoff in defining a current state of cultural ennui. There’s only so long one can gaze at Prendergast’s single catatonic expression; it’s one thing when he’s trapped and isolated inside the suit, but he wears the same face at, say, his sister-in-law’s dinner table. The cure for helplessness ought to be to do something, but when Salman finally acts, his actions are as peculiar as everything else. (One involves a grocery clerk dressed as a giant cheese. And when he lures Leslie out to witness a betrayal in progress, who’s home minding the kids?) Still, the movie does achieve some grace notes toward the end. Leslie’s confession that she “didn’t expect to be a war bride” feels heartfelt (although it doesn’t quite make up for her abdication from her life and her kids early on). And the scene where Salman (in the blue suit) finds rapprochement with his nephews at a children’s’ party has a nice, wistful touch. But the film’s subtext—Salman’s emotional rebirth (he’s even “born” out of the blue suit)—would work better if its comic sensibility weren’t so strained. KABLUEY** (out of four)With Lisa Kudrow and Scott Prendergast. Written and directed by Scott Prendergast. A Regent release. Rated PG-13. 86 minutes.
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
|
