Vengeance (2022 | USA | 107 minutes | B.J. Novak)
Is there any sadder fate than being the last (rich) white man in Brooklyn without a hit podcast? Sure, Ben Manalowitz (B.J. Novak) has a plum job at the New Yorker (not New York magazine), a huge apartment with a view, no shortage of rooftop party invites, and a phone that’s constantly blowing up with messages from the half-dozen women he’s simultaneously casually “dating”. But he (feels that he) has (somewhat incongruously given his actual job) no platform by which to prattle his ideas about the true source of America’s divisions — not by geography or politics, but by asynchrony and self-curation — into the ears of millions of captive listeners.
Hard to imagine anything more tragic, isn’t it? Perhaps dying alone of an opiate overdose at an all night West Texas oil field party at the intersection of four law enforcement agencies eager to pass the buck? Even worse, having your last sad text going unanswered and your presumed long-time boyfriend having no idea who you were when your family calls to tell him that you’re dead? Yeah, that is worse, but at least you’re a dead white girl whose demise came under ever-so-slightly mysterious circumstances, which is the chum in the water of the smash podcast producer.
With this news of a half-remembered hookup’s death and the insistence of her family that he be at the funeral, Ben hops a (series of) flights to get to her small West Texas hometown. Casting himself in the lead role for his directorial debut, Novak plays to type as the slick city guy befuddled by the quirky small town family whose tragedy he hopes to mine for marketable meaning.
With a long career in comedy, writers rooms, and a splash in front of the camera on the Office, Novak seems to have accumulated a far-reaching network to leverage in making this first feature. With production under the Blumhouse umbrella, the film arrives with some assurance of quality. Further, Lyn Moncrief’s cinematography captures the desolate beauty of West Texas and Finneas provides an engaging soundtrack. There are tons of fun cameos including one that will certainly dazzle fellow NPR devotees in the audience.
Access to this deep well of talent elevates the film above the typical shaggy indie debut. Sure, the overeager and plainspoken family’s characterization is a bit threadbare, but the strong cast finds dimension in these folksy, gun-toting, Texas-loving, clan. J.Smith Cameron adds a smidge of Gerri (Succession) shrewdness to the happy homebody matriarch she played on Rectify. Louanne Stephens dusts off Grandma Saracen, except with both sharper memory and more cutting wit. And as the eldest brother, Boyd Holbrook provides the inciting delusion of the film: the certainty that his pseudo-brother-in-law Ben will, a day after first meeting, join him in exacting bloody vengeance on his sister’s killer.
Indeed, while the family harbors delusions about the depth of the relationship between Ben and their beloved aspiring singer-songwriter daughter Abilene (like her fame-hungry sisters is named after a city), this isn’t their biggest leap of logic. They’re convinced that their daughter who “wouldn’t even take an Advil” couldn’t possibly have been into drugs. Instead, they’ve imagined a scenario where her death was a murder that’s being overlooked by an incompetent pair of cops and the various other agencies who’d rather not investigate. Ben brushes off the idea of hunting down the real killer with guns, but quickly gets them to agree to participate in his podcast (that way the Reddit people can do the dirty work).
The potential to explore the persistence of personal disbelief amid a mountain of facts, along with the drugs and murder angles, convince high-powered podcast producer Eloise (Issa Rae, who plays the role like an accessible Oprah, a journalistic sounding board, and fairy godmother) to fund Ben’s investigation into America. With her support, he takes up residence in his forgotten hook-up’s childhood bedroom (alongside her sweet ten-year-old brother) and begins putting his investigative journalism skills to work. Following the family’s suspicions, he’ll get the town’s drug cartel member on the record at the local rodeo and will venture to Marfa to interview a music producer spinning dreams in his Marfa recording studio (a fun, if hammy, Ashton Kutcher). Each stop provides new occasions for expectations to be upset or for Ben to prove himself to be an urbane idiot, whether it’s being less well read than a teenager, not remembering the Alamo, or cheering for the wrong Texas in a desperate attempt to fit in.
The actual mystery — Abilene’s death — is less mysterious than the extraneous questions that confront the audience while following along on Ben’s journey of discovery. For instance, does the world really need yet another Dead White Girl serial? And if so, why is Ben chasing this story as an entry into the world of Big Pod instead of for the New Yorker, the magazine that pays his bills and got him a big check mark. But more disconcerting is the apparent lack of mourning from a family who just lost their daughter as the days of cheerfully indulging her supposedly beloved boyfriend stretch into weeks or even months. At the cognitive dissonance built, I wondered whether these incongruities were clues or simply shallow scripting.
Although I began to worry that this setup was beginning to echo Jon Stewart’s loathsome irRESISTible, Novak’s story is both softer and less smug. His comedic knives drawn, but not especially sharp. Further the gentle humor, more often than not, is at his own character’s expense. While he gumshoes across the dusty desert, becomes wowed by the vast emptiness of the wide open country, and charmed by the kindness of strangers, Novak gives himself a little arc of growth and self-reflection. The material is a bit threadbare, but even shallowly drawn characters are never reduced to caricature.
As amusing as it was to spend time with these people, the denouement feels both rushed and delayed. A revelation induces a blowout; there’s another round of self discovery, and then the plot kicks into another gear. One might have wished for director to have found the energy of the third act a bit sooner, both to support the final conclusion as well as to have moved the occasionally dog-eared story along with more of a sense of building momentum. Ironic, or appropriate, then that a similar complaint is often leveled against many popular serialized podcasts from audiences eager for an ending in the face of a host who’s fell in love with his own voice and the characters they’ve met along the way.
Vengeance arrives in theaters on July 29th
Photo via Focus Features