Lee Daniels (2012)
Pete Dexter’s 1995 novel The Paperboy is narrated by young Jack James, working as a driver for his elder brother Ward and a fellow journalist on The Miami Times as they try to prove the innocence of a man on death row. In the film of the novel, with a screenplay by Lee Daniels and Dexter, the narration is supplied by Anita, a black maid in the household of the Jansen family (as the James’s have been renamed). Jack Jansen grew up to be a writer and wrote a novel based on the events that the film goes on to describe. In a prologue, an interviewer asks Anita how much of Jack’s novel is true and she replies ‘All of it’, although it’s unclear from what follows how she knows this: Anita isn’t witness to most of the scenes of the story. The film-makers’ decision to retain a narrator but change their identity is bizarre for another reason too. It means that Jack Jensen has to compel attention entirely through what the actor playing him does with the character on screen, and the actor in question is Zac Efron. It soon becomes clear that Efron is in the role for entirely visual reasons: in the first half of The Paperboy, his main purpose seems to be to appear topless as often as possible. Efron was OK as the stagestruck teenage protagonist of Me and Orson Welles, orbiting the effulgent Welles and various other colourful theatricals. But although the people Jack Jansen’s with in The Paperboy are also more eccentric than he is, Jack’s coming-of-age, as a person and a writer, involves a very different dynamic and Zac Efron is inadequate – he expresses nothing. Because Jack should be the focus of the story and Efron is so weak, there is no focus at all. I didn’t get whether Lee Daniels meant the audience to be primarily interested in the attempts to clear the condemned man’s name or in the interactions of Jack, Ward, the other journalist and the principal female character. I knew that I wasn’t much interested in anything going on.
This may be unfair to Dexter’s novel but The Paperboy looks, on the basis of the screenplay, to comprise the familiar ingredients of a Deep South crime melodrama and very little that’s new. As well as the embryo writer, these ingredients include: a long hot summer; redneck sexual prejudice and rampant racism; a man in the condemned cell for a crime he maybe didn’t commit (the murder of a local sheriff, a massively overweight racist-tyrant); a shopsoiled but spiritually pure piece of mutton dressed as lamb (with the vaguely symbolic name of Charlotte Bless); covert, lurid homosexuality; white trash who make a living killing beasts (swamp alligators) and have a similar disregard for human life. The concoction is a glop thanks to Lee Daniels’ messy and meaningless direction. He lurches from one form of shallow attention-getting to another – from split-screen images to slow motion, from jump cuts to hand-held camerawork, as if he’s eavesdropping on the lives of the people in the story. Michael Schulman, a staff writer on the New Yorker, has already called The Paperboy ‘a camp classic’ but it’s hard to enjoy when Daniels combines lack of taste and lack of originality to such a degree. Human bloodshed is presented as impersonally as alligator innards. The only thing that makes Daniels’ approach distinctive is that, because he’s African-American, he’s freer to present all the lowlife crudely, regardless of colour (whereas a white director might tend to be more restrained in a negative presentation of blacks).
None of the cast other than Efron could be described as weak exactly but most of the characters are so one-dimensional that most of the actors seem overemphatic. As the condemned man Hillary van Wetter, John Cusack’s sweaty intensity yields no surprises; in his early scenes, Matthew McConaughey (as Ward Jansen) has a promising alertness and a secretive light in his eyes – he becomes less interesting as Ward’s homosexuality is revealed. The proud, smartass black journalist Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo) is a bit like the lofty lodger played by Don Warrington in Rising Damp – until he reveals that his posh English accent is a put-on and he’s really a local boy made good (the point being that he couldn’t have made good if he hadn’t disguised himself). Macy Gray does well as Anita: the character’s narration is a waste of time but Gray gets over Anita’s affectionate-verging-on-sexual feelings for Jack in ways which, by the standards of this film anyway, are nuanced. Ned Bellamy is good as Hillary van Wetter’s brother and the Jansen boys’ father is played by the dependable Scott Glenn but Nealla Gordon has an impossible task in the thin, cliched role of the snotty, racist stepmother-in-waiting. Viewers eager for camp enjoyment in The Paperboy are most likely to find it in Nicole Kidman’s Charlotte Bless – I guess especially in the scene on death row when Charlotte brings Hillary van Wetter to orgasm by pouting and sighing and semi-exposing herself a few feet away from him. Kidman is, however, also the only good reason for seeing the movie. She has the externals just right – the precarious walk on too-high heels, the practised sultriness – but she gives Charlotte an authentically tired soul, which counterpoints the tacky glamour. Nicole Kidman’s performances in a variety of films during the last decade – Moulin Rouge!, The Human Stain, Cold Mountain, The Golden Compass, Australia – made me dread her next appearance on the screen. Her latest work, in Rabbit Hole, Stoker and now here, is making me change my mind.
2 April 2013
