The Paperboy: Review TIFF 2012 Dark, Violent, Explicit Language & Sex

The Paperboy, Lee Daniel’s bloody crime drama based on the 1995 novel by Pete Dexter, competed at Cannes and at TIFF and now goes to the NYFF. Despite an outstanding cast including Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey and John Cusack, there is no soul to this film. The New York Times describes the book as ‘eerie and beautiful’, which is hard to believe if it was the inspiration for this movie. Daniels takes every opportunity to assault the audience with unnecessarily brutal, ghastly scenes of blood and sex while failing to really provide a context for all this dysfunctionality.  Maybe the sex sounded more thrilling in the book; on screen it fell flat.

Zac Efron admirably portrays handsome, young Jack James, heir to the family newspaper. Jack like the rest of his family and everyone we meet in this film is a misfit. Jack becomes mesmerized with the only female he has much interaction with — forty something Charlotte (Nicole Kidman).  Charlotte seems to be fully immersed in a character she might have been 20 years earlier and desperate for male attention.  She is a pathetic character who is intent on living out fantasies of Romeo and Juliet romances with men behind bars. She writes copious, sexually explicit letters to a variety of inmates and finally settles on one: Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack) whom she intends to marry. Van Wetter is a particularly dysfunctional, objectionable man on death’s row for the gruesome murder of the local county sheriff.  The sheriff had a reputation for unconscionable brutality. Van Wetter lives in the mangrove swamps and makes a living skinning alligators. Not exactly the Romeo one might have in mind. He is driven by very basic urges and is brutal and uncouth, the epitome of depravity.

Jack’s brother Ward James (Matthew McConaughey) is another damaged soul. Ward is a newspaper journalist in Miami, he returns home with a fellow journalist (David Oyelowo) in pursuit of a newspaper story that will bring them international fame. Ward’s return home is prompted by the desire to discover a story that would prove that Van Wetter is innocent. Van Wetter with Ward’s assistance could be proven innocent, get off death row and marry Charlotte. Many complicated and unfortunate aspects of the characters’ personalities become all too apparent as the story unfolds. Lets just say the alligators with their guts hanging out in the mosquito-infested swamps were normal and predictable unlike any of the characters in the story. I would have preferred to see a little more of the southern landscape (other than the nightmarish chases through the swamp), and a little more context for the story, but Daniel’s made a choice – blunt sensationalism instead of sharp story telling — shock with little meaning.