Mr. Brooks (2007)

Director: Bruce A. Evans

Cast: Kevin Costner, Demi Moore, Dane Cook, William Hurt

Have I Seen It Before: Yes. I have a vague memory of watching at some point in the last 18 years, and it has been sitting on my DVD shelf for several years, so I really had to have.

For the entire time I’m sitting there during this viewing and thinking that there would be—and indeed, I had even previously seen—a revelation that William Hurt’s Jiminy Cricket character looks like Costner’s father.

But that isn’t really there. What film was I watching way back when?

Did I Like It: It’s a nice—especially in a pre-Dexter world—premise, telling the story of a seemingly respectable man harboring a monster inside.

The problem with a nice premise is that it will only reliably fuel a trailer. I’m sure the trailer for Mr. Brooks is quite nice. Then again, I couldn’t be troubled to watch that trailer on the DVD, so… I don’t know.

Yes, I do, actually, know. If there is a hypothetical limit to the critical mass of subplots, then Demi Moore’s character in this approached it, if she didn’t shatter it. She’s after Kevin Costner (but doesn’t really know it). She’s tangling with Dane Cook, thinking he has some Kevin Costner energy. He doesn’t, but I’ll get to that here in a bit. She’s also got an ex-husband that’s causing problems. Then she also has another case that is haunting her. All of this, and she is not really the protagonist. That’s too much. So much, in fact that it’s inevitable that all of those elements will make up the parts of the third act, and do so pretty awkwardly.

It’s an awkward ungainly way to do a film.

And against all odds, I only get to the end of this review before I note that I have no idea why Dane Cook is in this film, and he never seems to quite know either. It’s not so great when he’s got to be the catalyst for all these plots.

The Big Chill (1983)

Director: Lawrence Kasdan

Cast: Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. A part of me has always had a vague ambition to write something like this that is divorced from genre and is just people existing.

Did I Like It: And yet another part of me has resolutely refused to do anything of the sort*. The dialogue on display here is almost uniformly great, the performances are pitch perfect (Kline and Goldblum especially are naturally living in their eventual screen personas during their nearly first at bat), and the soundtrack is so perfect that it’s hard to think of “Joy to the World” or “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”** without thinking about the film.

But, and I say this with absolute sincerity and honesty: I don’t get it.

Maybe it’s a generational thing. Facebook oozed into existence while I was still in college, so the idea of losing touch with the people in your life at that moment is as technologically quaint as the VHS camera treated like the Monolith throughout the film. I can see the need to show up for a funeral, but the motivation behind staying for an entire weekend with people, as Nick (Hurt) correctly points out, “a long time ago knew each other for a short period of time” absolutely mystifies me. This, even more so when I realize I am not older than the characters at the time the story takes place.

This doesn’t even begin to cover the problem solving and attempts at emotional maturity here. Apparently allowing Harold (Kline) to impregnate Meg (Mary Kay Place) resolves all of the other infidelity? Everyone’s fine now? What about when Meg has a kid and they have to explain to Harold and Sarah’s (Close) current children that they’ve had a younger sibling this entire time, and that the origin of how their father came to father another child out of wedlock will only invite more questions than answers.

Maybe its just a generational thing. Boomers, man. I just don’t know.

*I’m not going to give up the ghost on doing a story about college friends reuniting years-plus later, only to find that Kevin Kline is deeply deranged and wants to wear them all as coats as soon as possible.

**Which somehow isn’t included in the soundtrack album, which is either a sign that the label was legendarily dumb, the Rolling Stones are infinitely greedy, or some mixture of both.