Look, being a writer isn't easy. And being a writer in a work of fiction is even worse. It doesn't matter if you're a Stephen King creation like Jack Torrance, taking a winter job as the Overlook's caretaker only to have its ghostly inhabitants tempt you with booze and try to get you to murder your wife and son. Hell, even Paul Sheldon who pretty much has his act together in Misery gets his cockadoodie ass put through the wringer by his number one fan. And the world of film isn't much better. In Barton Fink, the Coens force their character on a surrealist journey through a Hollywood hellscape and then there's Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation., where his character's writer's block means almost getting himself killed at the hands of a toothless crazy person and some ornery alligator. What I'm saying here is that if you're a writer in someone else's story, you're probably going to have some messed up shit happen to you.
Which brings me to Crispian Mills and Chris Hopewell's 2012 (released here in the US this past February) comedy/horror film A Fantastic Fear of Everything - a film that will certainly not be causing an increase in applications to creative writing MFA programs. Unfortunately, that's not simply from all the terrible things that happen to the film's protagonist, Jack Nife (played by Simon Pegg and yes, that's his actual name). No, while first time directors, Mills (who also wrote the film and is primarily known as the frontman for the band Kula Shaker) and Hopewell (who up until this point has made his name directing music videos) display flashes of potential, benefiting primarily from their previous careers, they also demonstrate their inexperience with a film that tries to do so many things that it all ends up feeling clumsy and arbitrary.
Throughout the film, Pegg has the stage mostly to himself as a successful children's author who hates his career and is attempting to escape the straight jacket he's put himself in by writing a series of screenplays titled Decades of Death and heavily influenced by the lives and heinous crimes of some of Victorian England's worst serial killers. And, of course, being a writer in someone else's story, Jack's research into his subjects' horrific deeds has left him a phobic, panic-stricken, nightmare-suffering mess convinced that someone or something is going to hop out from behind his shower curtain or out of his closet and dismember him. When his literary agent Clair (Clare Higgins) informs him that a hotshot TV producer is interested in Decades of Death and wants to meet with him, the task of putting on clean clothes and venturing across town seems Herculian. This is, after all, a man who spends most of his time in his underwear shrieking at shadows and stabbing at the air with his kitchen knife. Eventually, after a bunch of voice-over worrying and slapstick comedy involving supergluing a his knife to his hand and setting his outfit on fire, Jack finally surmises that the only thing left to be done is a trip to the launderette. This is when the film introduces us to the fact that Jack actually has a crippling fear of launderettes which he must overcome with great difficulty and-- Wait, what?
Much like the twisted logic of Jack's own inane theories, the storyline of A Fantastic Fear of Everything pretty much goes wherever it wants without regard to anything that's come before it or, you know, anything that makes actual sense. What ends up happening is that you get a movie that feels like a bunch of different writers collaborated on it without actually reading what any of the other writers had written. It's like the Frankenstein monster if there had been a bunch of different scientists who were each allowed to do part of the monster but not allowed to see what the other scientists had done and you ended up with a creation that had the torso of a body builder, the legs of a ballerina and a cat's head - all fine parts, but not a pretty picture when you smash them all together. First, we're shown that Jack is hopelessly dysfunctional, but his voice over suggests that this is a new development. Then at the launderette, it's suggested that his problems are actually lifelong issues based in childhood trauma. THEN in the final act, an up to this point unknown character (Amara Karan) is introduced and the whole thing shifts into an intimate thriller and entirely drops the whole dysfunction angle as if to imply simply identifying the cause of the trauma is an instant panacea. And I could probably even accept this if there was any sort of cohesiveness or emotional resonance to anything onscreen. However, the film bounces from scene to scene, making incomprehensible leaps in narrative and concept. Everything is put towards making each joke or gag the funniest it can be. But without considering how these scenes, jokes and gag connect to one another, it all just falls apart.
But I don't want to completely shit all over the movie. Even though they may not make much sense in context, many of those individual scenes, gags and jokes are marvelous. Mills and Hopewell have a clear visual sense and much of their use of slow motion, stop motion and slapstick is fantastic. Their ability to block a shot is also amazing. Perhaps the greatest sequence and gag in the movie involves Jack negotiating his way around a local laundromat. The way Mills and Hopewell are able to arrange the camera so that the punchline of the gag isn't revealed until way into the scene is brilliant. And while I know many critics have complained about the use of the music in the film, I think it's one of the film's stronger components. Mills being an accomplished singer-songwriter himself and Hopewell having directed acts such as Radiohead, the Killers, Scissor Sisters and Franz Ferdinand, the pair clearly know what they're doing in this world. That being said, while others may feel that the music is too foregrounded, with the film already being as all over the place as it is, I won't apologize for the fact that I cracked up watching Simon Pegg strut down a London street in a large, hooded overcoat and his knife glued hand in his pocket to the sounds of Ice Cube's "Wrong Nigga 2 Fuck Wit." And any chance I can get to hear Europe's "The Final Countdown" blaring out of boombox in a basement that looks like Freddy Krueger's home, I'll take it. Mills and Hopewell's taste in things visual and aural are consistently compelling even when their narrative isn't.
It's hard to talk about anything Simon Pegg's in and not mention his friend and frequent collaborator (and the man who pretty much put him on the map) Edgar Wright, especially with a film that shares so many connections to Wright's material. With Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End, Pegg has been given many opportunities to show us all what a charismatic and versatile performer he is. And while A Fantastic Fear of Everything, like all of Wright's films, is visually striking, without Wright's storytelling ability and the cohesion that all of his character's have, it's hard for Pegg to completely come alive here. Sure, when he's running around his home, shrieking and super-gluing things and talking to himself, he fills the screen with a manic energy. And when the script allows him to be truly funny, he is a riot. In the end, however, Jack Nife (whose name should have been a hint) is never given the chance to rise to the level of some of Wright's characters like Shaun or Nicolas Angel or Gary King. Instead, Jack amounts to little more than a caricature.
Admittedly, I don't like being so negative about a film when the directors are clearly talented and have a ton of ambition to go along with it. However, despite their terrific sense of visual storytelling, it just can't get them out of the hole dug by Mills's script. In such a longstanding tradition of British comedy/horror, A Fantastic Fear of Everything's jokes can sometimes feel too forced and when they don't, they often end up taking away from what few scares the film has. Just as Jack Nife is paralyzed by his association with his new project, Mills and Hopewell might have been better off letting someone else choose their material.
Like I said, being a writer isn't easy.
6.5 out of 10
