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Film
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The Chumscrubber
No, this isn’t a film about some British guy who makes a living by giving sponge baths to his mates. But it could be, and therein lies the main problem with this otherwise noteworthy debut.
Friday, November 11, 2005
By Todd Gilchrist
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Talented filmmaker Arie Posin
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The easiest way to describe The Chumscrubber is to say it’s a good movie with a bad title.
Better by far than the not-so-different Thumbsucker - despite competing ensembles and even a shared actor between them (young Lou Taylor Pucci, who starred in the other film but offers a supporting turn here) - Arie Posin’s feature directorial debut is a slightly surreal exploration of suburban life. It doesn’t have the same stinging insistence of ‘reality’ as its predecessor, but a far deeper sting, especially for those unlucky enough to experience some or any of the indignities these characters endure.
Still, as a film that one expects is trying to garner some commercial acclaim for its young director, one can only wonder how many development meetings went down before the producers acquiesced to Posin’s demand that the film be anointed with this (very) unfortunate name.
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Newmarket Films
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Co-stars Bell, Chatwin
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Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot) stars as Drew, a typically alienated teenager who stops by to visit his drug-dealing best pal only to discover that he hung himself. Curiously unaffected by his friend’s death, Drew returns to school in the days following and is approached by a classmate, Crystal (Camilla Belle), who wants Drew to retrieve the drugs to which the entire school now seems hopelessly addicted. Refusing to help, Drew returns to his isolated routine, but is soon contacted again by Crystal, who along with Billy (Justin Chatwin) and Lee (Pucci), has kidnapped a younger classmate and refuse to return him until he agrees to help them.
As Drew decides whether or not to help Crystal and her bullying cronies, his parents try to draw him out to talk about his friend, even as the neighborhood converges on two major social events - his dead friend’s wake and the wedding of the mayor (Ralph Fiennes) and a local designer (Rita Wilson). All of these seemingly disparate but inextricably connected events come together in catastrophic fashion when the wake and the wedding take place on the same day, just as Drew tries to save the kidnapped kid by confronting his schoolmates, and ultimately, his own feelings.
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Newmarket Films
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Co-star Glenn Close
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As mentioned before, the terrain this film traverses is familiar to most moviegoers, particularly those with an affinity for stories about adolescence. Rather than aiming for a purely factual depiction of teenage life, however, Posin takes a single step backward and renders a unique satire about the modern state of generational relations - parent to child, adult to adult, and most importantly, one teen to another. The kids are drawn so sharply and accurately that I found myself championing the possibility that the bully, played with deadly ferocity by War of the Worlds’ Justin Chatwin, would meet an untimely but wholly deserved violent demise.
Meanwhile, the adult characters are no more sympathetic or believable, but offer an additional perspective on parenting that any prospective caregiver should watch. From Rita Wilson’s self-obsessed negligence of her son to William Fichtner’s constant search for fictional gold in his kids’ foibles, this is genuinely the first time I’ve ever seen adult selfishness properly skewered in a context that actually matters; that is, when contrasted with their kids, who are the unfortunate benefactors of negligence and borderline abuse that will make them into like-minded adults one day.
Posin is a director born, and will no doubt do great things in the future. Based upon the supposed idea of his next film, about the Iraq war, he could be the next David O. Russell (Three Kings) if he plays his cards right. But here he seems to observe too well the old Hollywood axiom of ‘give them a great ending and it doesn’t matter what else you do’.
That isn’t to say the film isn’t consistently good, but it does have its share of narrative lags, and painfully fails to explain the whole ‘chumscrubber’ bit. So, by the time all of these story strands converge on the street corner outside Drew’s house, we’re ready for a fierce denouement. Posin’s climax delivers and then some, but it retreats into a subtle (perhaps too much so) retread of the Chumscrubber theme, which makes sense in the context of the film but ultimately feels unnecessary given the enormity of his story, the quality of the cast and his mastery of so many different and more integral elements.
Ultimately, The Chumscrubber works as a smarter version of those John Hughes movies we all watched as kids because it aims for the center of that surreal, satirical dart board of ‘teenage experience’ that frequently feels as if it’s been placed on the buttocks of the characters. Where most of these movies target their characters for relentless derision and dismissal before offering an unlikely, ham-fisted and painfully fake happy ending, this film’s ambiguity provides a more welcome conclusion to the real sorts of problems that teens actually have. Unexpectedly, a more real and accurate depiction of teenage life is what achieved from a hyper-real portrayal of suburban life; it’s almost as if a new word, one cobbled together from familiar elements into a radical new whole, might be necessary to accurately describe the achievement.
How about The Chumscrubber, you ask? Well, it’s not really right for the material, but overall it’s not bad for a first try.
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