'Vengeance' flirts with greatness and stays with you despite its flaws
Focus
“Vengeance” is both the funniest movie I’ve seen in quite a while and an example of something really good progressively falling apart. It’s an attempt to consider the divide between blue and red states that doesn’t actually look closely at either and yet still left me thinking about what it was trying to say. Even the title itself is a bit of a bait and switch, which is just fine by me; if you only wanted to see it because you love bloody movies about revenge, you’ve been duped … though I’m not sure that “Vengeance” necessarily has a lot to say about that either.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway, “Vengeance” is the feature writing-directing debut for star B.J. Novak (“The Office”), who’s an extremely good writer (check out his story collection “One More Thing,” featuring the extraordinary “The Something by John Grisham”) and utilizes his sharp wit on screen as well as on the page. The movie opens by demonstrating that Ben (Novak) is very much a cliche of millennial New York narcissism, putting minimal effort into any of his brief relationships—girls are so lazily identified by thin details in his phone that it still doesn’t clarify who’s who—and working successfully as a writer but desperately searching for a great idea about which to launch a podcast because he, ahem, needs to have his voice heard.
The plot hinges on Ben receiving a phone call alerting him to the death of his girlfriend—except he didn’t have a girlfriend, but his inability to say no to the woman’s brother, Ty (a charismatic Boyd Holbrook), leads him to small-town Texas and a story that high-powered Eloise (Issa Rae) agrees would make a great podcast: A heartbroken family desperately pursuing the conspiracy theory of their daughter/sister’s murder, when there’s no evidence to suggest the death was anything other than an overdose. It’s about people suppressing pain with fantasy, Ben says, and Eloise practically drools.
“Vengeance” then proceeds to spin circles around itself, as Ty and several others claim his sister Abilene (Lio Tipton) never even touched an Advil and Ben so delights in himself as the center of the story, the informed intellectual observing the clueless, that he neglects to ask the right questions to even ensure that he’s getting the story at all. Behind the scenes, Novak keeps things off-balance and engrossing, including a great supporting turn by Ashton Kutcher as a record producer full of profound insights just begging to be heard on a podcast.
But the movie’s supposed effort to bridge the gap between Brooklyn and Anywhere, USA never progresses farther than Abilene’s family treating Ben warmly and everyone he encounters proving to be more intelligent and well read than he assumed. It leads to some good laughs, but ultimately “Vengeance” is too much about one guy’s bias obscuring his perspective than a complex study of people from very different environments, particularly in Novak’s complete refusal to consider those people’s values and what that says about their character. A political divide drives the concept yet plays no role in the narrative.
Nevertheless: “Vengeance” asks some good questions about true-crime storytelling and authenticity in reporting and even the separate worlds of law enforcement that exist within the same country (or state, or city, or town). The ending might be terrible, but it’s a thinker, and any movie that makes you want to wrestle with it is doing something right.
B-
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