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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
THE LIVING WAKE The Living Wake is the whimsical tale of K. Roth Binew—a self-proclaimed artist and genius—who has just learned from his doctor that he has one day to live. Set in a leafy New England small town, the film follows Binew as he is peddled around on a rickshaw bicycle by his apparently only friend, and lackey, Mills Joquin, to deliver invitations to one final performance: his living wake, all done in the style of children’s TV with comic book characters within a faux-surrealistic bubble.
I imagine co-writer/star Mike O’Connell (K. Roth Binew) had Orson Welles in mind when molding his megalomaniac persona and this film—the opening sequence pastiche mimics the very newsreel montage which opens Citizen Kane. Unfortunately, his red-faced, shouting performance is not as charismatic as Welles’. His tricky word play was amusing for a short while, but it becomes as weary as the tone is tiresome.
Jesse Eisenberg (as Mills) is a solid supporting actor and the best thing about this movie, though he’s really only required to play one note. This is the problem with The Living Wake—it starts and finishes in almost the exact same way, and the possibility of Binew’s death leaves us just waiting for something significant to occur. If the film is trying to say something about society or the human condition, I was stumped as to what that might be. The film dragged from one quirky setup to another with no end in sight to the point at which I was really hoping the main character would hurry up and die. Not a nice feeling.
Because a cord tethering this whimsy to a relatable reality is never presented, it’s all but impossible to connect to any of the characters. Nor does the absurdity reach the comical levels or have the satirical edge of, say, Monty Python. A few lines were amusing but the movie was never actually funny.
In the
face of massive blockbusters that make no effort whatsoever, I generally
champion films that try to do something interesting or different, and I
wanted to like the film much more than I did. A film operating on a tiny
budget is always commendable, but even the half-million spent seems not
to have made its way onto the screen, with art direction down to a
minimum. Yet those visual elaborations might have made up for the lack
of narrative drive. Perhaps the arcane, literate text belongs on the
stage or, as one reviewer has suggested, “under the big top,” rather
than on a movie screen.
Oliver Irving
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