Hey folks, Harry here - this doesn't hit the U.S. till September 23rd of this year, but this film won the Silver St George for Best Director at the Moscow Film Festival and it has gotten great notices on the festival route. Let's get into it, and watch out for spoilers - there are a few here...
Hi, Harry. Long time reader, etc. Just sending you a take on the new flick from Dogme architects Thomas Vinterberg and Lars Von Trier, "Dear Wendy", which opened over the past few days here in the UK. I'm not sure if you or your US readers have already seen this, so it may be old news to you.
I only saw this flick due to being lured in by a Dogme-loving friend of mine, despite my not being a fan of the previous works of Von Trier and Vinterberg. The only film from to these guys that I connected with was Festen. The rest of the whole Dogme thing left me cold and at a distance. I dont wish to disrespect the artistry and the talent that went into these films, its just that I as a film viewer always seek to connect with a film and meet it on its own level. Films like "The Idiots" left me unable to do that.
So it is fitting that my reaquaintance with these filmmakers is on a film that sees a departure from the strict, spartan nature of Dogme.
"Dear Wendy"'s premise sees a bunch of teenage misfits in a small American town, each of them looking for a place to belong, and needing a sense of empowerment. We find Dick (Jamie Bell), a young man left alone after being orphaned becoming attached and fascinated to a small silver gun that he bought as a present for another kid, but the kid didn't want it. His obsession with the gun, which he names "Wendy" takes on a new dimension when a another of the town's kids, Stevie (Mark Webber) reveals his fascination with similarly antique weaponry. Sharing their common passion with the other kids, including Susan (Alison Pill) and Freddie (Michael Angarano) they form a shooting club. They each take and name their own special antique gun, firing them in a shooting range they build in the depths of the town's old mine. They also build a meeting place there called "the temple".
The club, calling themselves "The Dandies", dress in suitably dandy, garish period outfits and revel in the world they made for themselves. They hold their beloved guns in reverence and admiration, never forgetting the number one rule....never draw your gun on another...
This film was supposedly made to examine the American love of firearms, but I found it to be more of a look at typical teenage emotions, such as feelings of exclusion, desperation to belong and yet form an individual identity, and some more universal feelings like jealousy, pride, fear of emasculation and looking for something to define oneself, something to call your own. The story is far more about these things than an attack on the right to bear arms.
Sadly, the intriguing premise doesn't manage to carry the film past the finish line, and other events conspire to ensure that these things are not what last in your memory as the credits roll.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Of course, this being a film about kids with guns, you'd be forgiven for betting the ranch, the cows and the wife on things taking a deadly turn. But sadly they do so in a pat, predictable and occasionally illogical way. Things start to go downhill when Sebastian (Danso Gordon) is made A Dandy, at the behest of Sherriff Krugsby (Bill Pullman). Seb and Dick go back. Seb is the kid who Dick originally bought Wendy for, and Seb's grandma, the now senile Clarabelle (Novella Nelson) was Dick's maid. But Dick's jealousy of Seb (who is a better shot, and Susan is attracted to) brings an unnecessary and jarring note of racism into the film when Dick, responding confusedly to Susan's calling Seb "gorgeous", says that he's "brown".
Worse though, is the events that precipitate the final act. When Clarabelle shoots dead a deputy sherriff who she confusedly thought was a mugger, The Dandies, though present, were not responsible. But the next thing you know, Krugsby has the entire state police looking for them. A simple request for the Dandies to hand over the old lady to him requires a double-cross, a wild-west stand off and an arsenal of snipers. And so, a third act development that came completely out of nowhere leads to a shoot out, The Dandies vs The Police, that is tonally opposed to the rest of the film and sees The Dandies wilfully and suddenly abandon their avowed pacifism to go out shooting anything with a badge. After all their speeches about peacefulness and never drawing their guns on others, they go wild bunch, going out of their way to take out snipers with perfectly judged long-range ricochets.
Of course, they all go down in blaze of glory (no Bon Jovi, though. Natch.).
And so, at the end you ask yourself: what was the point of all that? The moral? "Fuck around with guns and people get shot." Well, thanks for that. All in all, this is a film that I would describe as 80% good and 20% crap. You are shown these characters and are lured into the strange but compelling world they inhabit, and in reward you end up with Vinterberg's Young Guns 3. This was a film loaded for bear but ended up going off half-cocked.
If you use this, call me Smoking Jacket.
