...the bad news is, Rubber's the best-weirdest film of 2010: Rubber ain't new, and if you live somewhere that's lucky enough to have an indie theater, you've probably already missed your chance to see it with an audience. The good news is, Rubber's just arrived OnDemand, and you'll be free to purchase it soon enough. Before that time comes, however, read on for our review to learn why you should seek out Dupieux's weird-ass film as soon as you can. Carry on, my gentle Examiner readers...
When you hear that Rubber is a horror film about a killer tire (it causes things to explode with its "mind"), you tend to conjure a few specific thoughts: that Rubber's going to be a purposefully-bad movie, that Rubber's a simple satire, that Rubber's probably not going to be as clever as it thinks it is, and so on. Maybe you'd be thrilled by that premise, but the first time I heard about Quentin Dupieux's Rubber, I was fairly certain that I could predict the entire film, sight-unseen. A funny idea, sure, but a feature film? Probably gonna be weak.
And so, Dupieux's Rubber proves that you should never judge a book by its cover. Or, in this case, you shouldn't pre-judge an independent horror film from a weirdo Frenchman by its premise. Rubber is incredibly clever-- wily, even-- impossible to look away from, funny, disturbing, and great in all the ways that David Lynch's films used to be great. Come to think of it, Rubber might be the best film that David Lynch never made. One imagines Lynch watching Dupieux's film with a shocked expression stuck on his face, Lynch sputtering in astonishment at what Rubber really is.
And what is Rubber, really? Is it a satire of cheesy horror films, the kind that turn an inoccuous household item into an agent of death? Is it meant to be watched literally, taken as it is? Is it a practical joke that Dupieux's playing on the entire film-geek community, something in the pointed style that Banksy's Exit Through The Gift Shop perfected last year? Unfortunately, I've only seen Rubber once, so it's hard for me to say. I suspect that-- once I get around to picking up the Blu-ray-- that I'm going to have to spend a few hours rewatching Dupieux's film to decide what I think it's really trying to say: it's that kinda thing.
The film opens along a dusty, desert highway. At first, all we can see is a velvet rope along the shoulder and a handful of cheap, folding chairs propped open in the center of the road. A cop cruiser comes rolling along, plowing right through the chairs and coming to rest right in front of the camera, which pulls back to reveal a crowd of onlookers. They're of every shape and stripe: housewives, dads with their kids, teenage girls, a black secretary-type, a biker, and so on. A cop climbs out of the trunk of the cruiser, approaches the crowd, and rants on for a few minutes about the predictability of movies, the nature of film. It's a jarring, headspinning start to Rubber, and from there on out, you're going to be working overtime to stay on the same page the film's on.
Soon enough, the film's anti-hero makes his appearance: Robert, the tire (yeah, the tire's got a name...and a lot of other things). Robert rises out of the desert sand, looks left, looks right, and starts rolling up the highway towards a lonely hotel. Along the way, the tire discovers that it has the power to destroy things with its "mind". Because Robert doesn't speak-- remember, he's a tire-- Dupieux's got to get all this information across by subtly moving the tire, through the environment around it, with musical cues. We don't know the tire has a "mind", but we know it shakes and emits a high-pitched buzzing noise just before whatever it's "looking" at explodes. It sounds weird when explained, but trust me: you'll probably go with it.
Once the tire arrives at the hotel, things start happening on two different levels of reality (at least, that's how I interpreted it): there's the "movie reality"-- where the tire's on the loose, a family in the hotel is in danger, and a pretty young girl staying in the hotel becomes the object of lust for Robert-- and there's the "audience reality"-- where the "audience" that we glimpsed in the film's opening serves as a sort-of Greek chorus to the events taking place in the "movie reality". It's not enough for Dupieux to satirize the cheesy-horror genre: he adds another layer or snarky commentary with his faux-audience. It works.
The film features work from several really great character actors, dudes that you're going to recognize-- but perhaps not be able to name-- as soon as they walk onscreen: Stephen Spinella, Ethan Cohn, Wings Hauser. They perform the script with no trace of irony, obviously what Dupieux would be after. If this thing were played for laughs-- rather than letting them be startled out of us through the film's insistent absurdity-- it'd fall flat on its face. But it doesn't, and somehow, against all odds, despite every reason that it shouldn't work, Rubber doesn't just succeed-- it flat-out rocks. Really, I had more fun watching Rubber than just about anything I've seen so far this year.
It doesn't necessarily wrap-up neatly, and you'll be left with a lot of lingering questions once the credits start to roll. But if you're the kinda cat that enjoys being challenged by film sometimes, or the type that'll happily watch a film more than once to raffle through its many layers, then you're going to love the sh-t out of Rubber. Congratulations to Quentin Dupieux: your first film is a homerun, and I'm jazzed to see what you come up with next.
My Grade? A+.
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