Beyond the Multiplex

My colleague Stephanie Zacharek will review Scott Frank's thriller "The Lookout" when it opens at the end of March, so I'll limit my comments here. Fueled by yet another terrific performance from Joseph Gordon-Levitt (star of "Brick" and "Mysterious Skin"), aka the "young Keanu," it's a curiously satisfying genre picture, with all the tight plotting and meticulous character building you'd expect from the writer of "Out of Sight," "Minority Report" and "Little Man Tate" (among other films).

Sparely shot on the depopulated plains of Kansas -- Frank specifically cites "Capote" as an inspiration, and I also thought of "A History of Violence" -- "The Lookout" is a subtly unsettling picture with a disordered hero. Chris (Gordon-Levitt) is a former high school stud trying to recover from a disabling head injury -- and from the accident (his fault) that caused it and killed two of his friends. Befriended by a charismatic, goateed bad boy named Gary (Matthew Goode, in what should be a breakout role for him), Chris is gradually drawn into an ill-fated robbery scheme, motivated at least as much by his damaged self-esteem as his brain injury.

This is Frank's first film as a director, but after all those years in the movie business he knows what he's doing. What seems at first to be not much more than a well-acted formula picture turns out to be full of little bombs, lines and images that detonate in your head hours or days later. It's too gradual, sinister and methodical for a contemporary Hollywood action movie, and too plot-driven for a classic character-based indie. Is it an honest entertainment or a work of art? Irrelevant question, and anyway the answer is a snaky, slithery somewhere in between. (My interviews with Frank and Gordon-Levitt are coming soon to Salon Conversations.)

That leaves Alan Cumming's indescribable and inexplicable "Suffering Man's Charity," which also premiered in downtown Austin's lovely Paramount Theater on Friday, just before "The Lookout" and for a much smaller crowd. Those who didn't show up missed seeing Cumming himself as a queeny, middle-aged music teacher who winds up imprisoning and torturing a young hustler played by David Boreanaz (of "Angel" and "Buffy" fame), who is wearing women's underwear and tied up with Christmas lights and duct tape (oh, and heavily medicated with sleeping pills). "Suffering Man's Charity" is just that kind of movie: It opens as if it's going to be a sad-sack gay comedy in a lesser Tennessee Williams mode. And then it goes completely insane.

Even before we get to Boreanaz and the Christmas lighting, we've already had Anne Heche as a femme fatale New York editor and Karen Black (Karen Black!) as a drunken, slutty hag stumbling around in her underwear and making obscene promises to Boreanaz's rent-boy character. Later in the film, there's a significant splatter quotient, an appalling vehicular accident, a vindictive ghost and a truly horrible New York literary party. This film is all genres at once, and a few that don't yet exist.

Given Cumming's far-reaching showbiz as a Shakespearean actor, kiddie-film villain (in "Garfield" and the "Spy Kids" series), novelist, indie director ("The Anniversary Party") and outspoken activist on gay issues, I have no doubt he can find a distributor for this willfully grotesque picture eventually. It's either a total disaster or a midnight movie cult hit in the making, and on first viewing I'm not sure which. As I told myself while I stumbled out into the steamy streets of Austin, for better or worse there was nothing like that at Sundance.

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