Real Review - Stuck

The story was strangely fascinating for people who follow weird-news sources like Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading Room: a woman driving at night had struck a homeless pedestrian with such force that he tumbled headlong over the hood of the car and straight through the windshield so that his body slumped across the dashboard, impaled on the shattered glass underneath it. Amazingly, the woman kept driving.

She drove all the way home and stashed the car in her garage, where she left him to bleed for death. (Authorities said that if the woman had sought help after the accident, he probably would have lived.) Finally, she sought the help of friends to dispose of the body and ruined, blood-stained car.

The whole sequence of events seemed unlikely, but there it was. The story had the whiff of sensationalism about it, but the facts seemed to check out. Just reading about it was infuriating, but I remember spending a lot of time mulling it over, trying to figure out what state of mind that woman had to be in. How tweaked did your brain have to be before it would allow you to ignore an ongoing tragedy of your making? How invested in your own self-interest do you have to be to shut out a death in slow motion that only you are witness to?

Stuart Gordon, not just a master of neo-Lovecraftian horror but also a director of impressively dark comedies, saw a film in the material. Gordon had a reputation as a provocative theater director before he splattered onto the film scene with Re-Animator, an impressively gross, tongue-in-cheek adaptation of a story by H.P. Lovecraft boasting one of the best sick sex jokes in film history, a signature performance by Jeffrey Combs as the Frankenstein-like title character, Herbert West, and an apparent claim to fame in terms of the sheer quantity of its bloodshed. (As Gordon tells the story, he believed his production held the record for gallons of fake blood expended until he met up with Peter Jackson, who informed him that his own zombie comedy, Braindead, aka Dead Alive, had bested it by two orders of magnitude.) Gordon had his ups and downs as a genre filmmaker, but in recent years he had been working at extending his range into sardonic character drama. In that regard, the unpleasant Edmond, which starred William H. Macy in an engaging turn as a difficult character, was something of a breakthrough.

But Stuck is something else entirely — it’s an energetic B-movie with pulpy magnetism. Think of it as slapstick social realism. Mena Suvari, also listed as a co-producer, stars as Brandi. Sporting a big, round forehead, an imperfect complexion, and an intricate network of cornrows winding across her scalp, she’s an appealingly unassuming protagonist. She’s introduced in the film’s very first sequence, in which incongruous hip-hop music thumps and rumbles on the soundtrack as accompaniment to images of the tired and bewildered looking residents of an old-folks home where Brandi works as a nurse, cheerfully cleaning up feces-smeared linens and brown-nosing her way toward a promotion - the thankless overtime duty and general ass-kissing involved just comes with the territory. Shortly thereafter, we meet Stephen Rea as Tom, a downsized management type who manages, just, to scramble out of his apartment with one good suit as his landlord evicts him. (Gordon’s major misstep is the introduction here of a gentle black character — too broadly written and baldly symbolic of the established but unseen American underclass, though perhaps he’s meant as an ironic invocation of the “magical negro” stereotype — who kindly lends Tom the shopping cart that serves as a sort of Charon’s boat into the underworld.)

Brandi celebrates her good fortune at work by getting hammered on a Friday night and driving home under the influence. Newly homeless Tom wanders the streets aimlessly after being rousted from a park bench by an unfriendly cop. And that’s where these two worlds collide.

What ensues is a very dark comedy about, mostly, Brandi’s take on events. (Poor Tom, impaled on nasty-looking shard of broken glass, has a fixed and limited perspective on the goings-on.) She treats the incident first as a minor inconvenience that she has to ignore in order to stay sharp when she heads in to work on a Saturday. When she realizes Tom is still alive, the problem begins to gnaw at her, but instead of summoning help she opts to protect herself by appealing to boyfriend Rashid to give Tom an extra push into the hereafter.

There’s nothing pretty about Stuck, an attribute that goes a long way toward establishing street cred. As B-movie directors increasingly migrate toward the clean, modern look of HD, this has a genuine low-budget film look, and its cocktail of sex, gore and comedy is a tasty recipe that’s rarely served up these days. A dust-up between Brandi and Rashid that begins with the tiny, ferocious Brandi ejecting a nude woman from Rashid’s bed isn’t just a funny scene, but also an illustration of how she’s directing all the emotional energy that she’s not expending on empathy for her hit-and-run victim. And the painful closeups of Tom’s squirm-inducing injuries aren’t just money shots for genre fans, but important grounding points for a story about suffering, and the deliberate ignorance of the suffering of others.

Brandi is something of a monster, yes, but that’s not to say Gordon doesn’t have some sympathy for her. He’s clearly interested in the gap between her aptitude with her patients and her callousness toward this bloody stranger. She’s also under exploitative pressure from her smugly condescending boss, who dangles the suggestion of a promotion in front of her just to see how far she’ll reach for it. But the fix that both Brandi and Tom find themselves in is the product of economic disadvantage — of her upward struggle toward a paycheck that can help make ends meet, and of the sudden downward mobility that put him out on the street in the first place. (The problems of the immigrant family living next door without documentation figure in as well.)

Yet this character has a great selfishness and sense of entitlement that eventually makes her fun to hate, and Gordon and Suvari both have a ball putting her through her paces. Of course, once the badly crippled Tom gathers his strength and his wits, Stuck turns into a bloody metaphor for life on the mean streets of contemporary America, where youth and callow ambition are having it out with age, grit and experience in a struggle for opportunity. It’s the horror movie that our recessionary times deserve.

Source: Deep Focus

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