Restless: Replete With Rigor (Mortis)

By Victoria Looseleaf

There’s a slew of reasons why Harold and Maude is not only a cult classic, but an all-purpose, bona-fide classic. One: Directed by Hal Ashby with an original screenplay by Colin Higgins, it was startlingly fresh. Two: It featured the fantastic Ruth Gordon as a Boho octogenarian and a completely winning Bud Cort in a star turn as the suicidal rich teen. Three: The icing on this sumptuous 1971 cake was music by the erstwhile Cat Stevens, knocking the whole film out of the celluloid ballpark.

Now this is a kooky, quirky, memorable love story.

But we digress: Restless, our movie du jour, directed by Gus Van Sant, is a two-fisted wannabe weeper without much going for it. Enoch, a depressed kid who lost his parents in a car wreck, goes to strangers’ funerals for solace in what is Van Sant’s nod, if not a direct rip-off of Harold and Maude (or as one reader of Michael Musto’s Village Voice blog  dubbed it: Harold and Maudlin). Enoch even sports dashing ensembles meant to imply that he, too, comes from big bucks. And where he lives must be a very small town (it’s actually Portland, Oregon), but picturesque, of course – because Enoch, who meets Annabel at one of said funerals, keeps running into her. Finally giving in to her perky powers of pursuasion, he quickly  learns that this pale-skinned angel will be dead of a brain tumor within three months, when those proverbially autumn leaves turn to glistening white snow. Cue violins!

Enoch is played by Henry Hopper (son of the late Dennis Hopper, remembered for such iconic films as Easy Rider, Blue Velvet and, er, Speed, as well as his photography, wives and volatile personality). Restless is Henry’s first film. Did he even have to audition or was his thespian DNA enough cred. Actually, he’s quite decent – and kinda gorgeous in that weird Hopperesque way. Too bad he had very little to do beyond saying, ‘Whatever’ a lot and looking pensively somber, his carefully gelled hair affectedly mussed. Aussie Mia Wasikowska has the unfortunate task of portraying Annabel, a bird-loving naturalist who wouldn’t hurt a flea – otherwise known as Siphonaptera – or other creatures she draws when she’s not busy getting blood transfusions, MRIs and worshipping at the altar of Charles Darwin.

But as much as Wasikowska nobly acquits herself, this story is doomed. Morbid. A no-win exercise in melancholia, Harris Savides’ Vaseline-lensed cinematography aside.

Adding more murk to this trifling plot is the ghost of a Kamikaze pilot, Hiroshi (a flat, uninteresting Ryo Kase, whose best moments come when he is not on screen, but reading the letter he penned to his love before taking that dive bombing plane ride). Of course, Hiroshi’s not actually real (and can only be seen/heard by Enoch), which might account for the invisibility of his acting.

Written by Jason Lew, this misguided venture, we learn from the press notes, began life as “a series of short plays.” Unfortunately, the entire kit, kaboodle and Kamikaziness still feel like vignettes. What we have here, essentially, is not only a failure to communicate, but a predictably gloomy fairy tale in which the talented Mr. Van Sant (his last film, Milk, was a keeper), once again trains his painterly eye on nubile young flesh (alas, never bared here), and beautiful, fresh-scrubbed faces.

Give us the delirious camp of the 1970 melodrama, Love Story, puhleeze, with the eternally quotable tag line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Making use of Francis Lai’s Academy Award-winning music as a relentlessly maudlin backdrop, that tearjerker featured a delectable Ryan O’Neal and the perennially mediocre if magnificent Ali MacGraw frolicking through Harvard Yard before she is hurled to her insanely sexy death. Now that was a perfect sob storm of a B-movie. In Restless, whose forgettable score is by Danny Elfman, we also have a B-movie, with ‘B,’ in this case, standing for brain dead.

Restless – and we at The Report wonder who came up with that insipid title –whose tag line should read, “Love means never having to grow up, grow old or go in debt!” – is fated to die a death quicker than Annabel’s.

Talk about a weird marketing campaign: Whose idea of playing dead was this?

Like the dud, One Day (click here to read The Report’s take on that flop), although not as wretched, this film is still a thankless downer. Death is bad, we move on. Let’s see what happens to Enoch when he turns 21 and collects his inheritance. Maybe he’ll meet an octogenarian, learn some real life lessons and make a film that doesn’t feel like a retread mash-up.

 

Hmm…Why does this scene from One Day with Anne Hathaway look so, well, eerily familiar?

About Victoria Looseleaf

Victoria Looseleaf is an award winning arts journalist and regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, KUSC-FM radio, Dance Magazine, Performances Magazine and other outlets. She roams the world covering dance, music, theater, film, food and architecture. Have pen - and iPad - will travel! Her latest book, "Isn't It Rich? A Novella In Verse" is now available on Amazon. Thank you for reading! Cheers...
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