movie review
BUCKING FASTARD
Running time: 109 minutes. Not yet rated. Starting Sept. 30 at the NY Film Festival.
Anybody who’s ever ridden the subway knows that weirdness has its limits.
Some kook’s bizarre behavor during a commute starts out scary or gross or amusing, and then gradually you just tune it out, or move seats. It’s the New York way.
Werner Herzog’s “Bucking Fastard,” a grabby title that’s far more fun than anything in the actual movie, suffers from that same arc of an early peak followed by a rapid decline in interest.
Oh how long and laborious this New York Film Festival flick becomes.
At first, the story of strangely inseparable sisters who dress identically and speak in unison like the Borg is appealingly odd, as one might expect of the 83-year-old German writer-director.
And then after about 10 minutes, the mood abruptly changes for the worse: This is siece of phit.
Sisters Kate and Rooney Mara play Ireland twins Jean and Joan Holbrooke, based on the real Freda and Greta Chaplin. They’re a dour duo of Wednesday Addamses who wind up in court for tormenting a man who they believed was in love with them, a showy drunk named Gareth played by Orlando Bloom.
The ladies have been aggressively on the hunt for a boyfriend — and not separately, by the way.
Near the start, they’re both in the sack with Gareth, dropping flower petals on his torso and peeking under the covers at his little Legolas.
Ahem, how exactly did they get there?
“Why don’t you come to the shed?,” they eerily suggest together. “We’d like to show you our inner cowgirl.”
Now that’s a Werner Herzog pickup line if there ever was one.
Most of Herzog’s script sounds irritatingly like that — dim, thinly drawn characters colorlessly saying ridiculous things with catherdral seriousness.
In another scene, Jean and Joan go to a gas station wielding only a small glass bottle, and a member of gang called the Chicken Chokers (“We choke chickens,” he clarifies) asks them why they’d only want a single pint of gas.
“We all need fuel,” the girls respond in the robotic cadence of “I’ll be bahck.”
There were scattered laughs throughout my screening. Pinkies out and proud. But it seemed less like the audience members were chuckling at the antics of Jean, Joan and the creepy men around them than at Herzog’s boldness for having people actually do and say this stuff in a real movie.
The first few promising scenes suggest that the trial with Gareth will provide a structure for “Bucking Fastard.” Not so fastard. The girls soon skip town, and thus commences an aimless meander through the Emerald Isle at its least visually alluring.
Everywhere they go, Jean and Joan, with unexplained American accents, act like the Children of the Corn. Although given their age and locale, we’ll call them the Adults of the Potatoes.
Their Quixotic quest to find love — in a Dublin apartment, in a country farmhouse, digging a tunnel in a cave to try to reach the Orkney Islands (Look, I dunno) — is a folktale as told by a severely inebriated old man. Just when we think we’ve reached whatever the point is, here comes another nutty tangent.
The Holbrookes, we’re told, are supposedly tabloid sensations after the trial, which manifests as two Dublin pervs lackadaisically stalking them for a spell.
A sort-of suitor named Timothy (Domhnall Gleeson) spends minutes — minutes! — teaching them how to open a sardine can.
From there, the movie gets even more peculiar and less interesting.
When they leave the drab city for green rolling hills, an evil-ish guy comes and kills all the local foxes because there is a breakout of rabies. Perhaps diseased wild canines are a metaphor for freaky twins?
A nicer, but no less unbalanced fellow gives them a tour of a cave and explains to them the origin of a mysterious manmade passage.
“Some say it was dug by a mathemetician who lost it,” he says.
It’s like the director is daring us not to care.
The only real virture of “Bucking Fastard,” which, if you can’t tell, I found extremely annoying and induldgent while in service of neither entertainment nor profundity, are the Maras. They successfuly manage to fuse into one spooky entity, although the Holbrookes are not conjoined twins. And yet, while a singular organism, the actresses also maintain a subtle individuality. Kate has an intense face and frequently furrowed brow while Rooney stays ghoulishly aloof.
They work extraordinarily hard to get us invested in the dreams of their mistreated characters. But with Herzog’s nonsense script and the detached American Gothic tone, yeah bucking right.
