Born Guilty
Directed by: Max Heller
Written by: Max Heller
Starring: Jay Devore, Rosanna Arquette, David Coussins, Keesha Sharp, Anna Lore, Jay Klaitz, Xander Berkeley, John Lavelle
Comedy/Drama/Romance - 101 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 9 May 2018
Written by: Max Heller
Starring: Jay Devore, Rosanna Arquette, David Coussins, Keesha Sharp, Anna Lore, Jay Klaitz, Xander Berkeley, John Lavelle
Comedy/Drama/Romance - 101 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 9 May 2018
To tell his story of an exasperated son paying a friend to romance his mother, writer/director Max Heller chose to go ’80’s sitcom. There is the familiar, poppy flute and keyboard as a character goes about their business and when two people hug, one of them stares at the ceiling and smiles over-showing us how happy he is. Beneath this superfluous veneer lurks the truly off-putting. The sitcom vibe tries to hide the ugly. There are no likable characters in Born Guilty.
Plenty of films feature anti-heroes, villains, and all-around loathsome characters, but in a romantic comedy? Marty (Jay Devore), easily the most nauseating of them all, would not be your friend in real life. You wouldn’t want to meet him for dinner, at the bar for drinks, or even share time at the water cooler. Personally, Marty suffocates under the weight of his mom’s phone calls and endures a most curious and unhappy relationship with a girlfriend he has nothing in common with. Professionally, Marty has yet to learn prioritization and time management nor how to behave at work with his boss and co-workers. He is a mess.
Plenty of films feature anti-heroes, villains, and all-around loathsome characters, but in a romantic comedy? Marty (Jay Devore), easily the most nauseating of them all, would not be your friend in real life. You wouldn’t want to meet him for dinner, at the bar for drinks, or even share time at the water cooler. Personally, Marty suffocates under the weight of his mom’s phone calls and endures a most curious and unhappy relationship with a girlfriend he has nothing in common with. Professionally, Marty has yet to learn prioritization and time management nor how to behave at work with his boss and co-workers. He is a mess.
Marty is also a yeller. He screams at his mom, his girlfriend, at himself, and at Rawl (David Coussins), a jaw-dropping Chris Hemsworth knock-off who Marty knew at college. Marty’s grand solution to solve all of his problems is to pay Rawl to fly out to New York City, meet cute with his mom, and get her to relax. - to hell with the 30 year age difference. What would happen in a sitcom? Rawl falls in love with Marty’s mom, Judith (Rosanna Arquette, Draft Day), egging on another Marty foible; he prefers to break down and scream in public. He ensures an entire sushi restaurant learns his mother is a female ejaculator because that is the kind of man Marty is.
Want to break up with your girlfriend? If you’re Marty, don’t do it at home, go to her fashion show! Want to get 30 years of guilt-ridden angst off your chest and finally lay into mom? Go to an old folk’s home where she is working that day! It’s all makes as much as sense as Rawl’s tendency to grin at the ceiling every time he gets an idea or a case of the warm fuzzies. Back to the Chris Hemsworth knock-off bit, there is even a Blackhat movie poster in the background at one point should the lack of subtlety somehow elude an audience member.
Romantic comedies also come with the friend. You know the friend. They usually get the best lines, they have an off-the-wall hobby, or some other one-dimensional defining characteristic. Check this one out. In Born Guilty, the friend, Rupert (Jay Klaitz), has two things: 1) he is agoraphobic and 2) he drinks his own piss which he stores in the refrigerator. Fine, if you are afraid to go outside, so be it. There are plenty of examples of amusing hermits in movies. But drinking your own piss? WTF Max?! It’s not funny, it’s not weird, it’s some downright strange shit and I can’t believe you wrote that in. It doesn't go anywhere, they never circle back to it, it's just hanging out there as an awkward attempt to make some people nervously chuckle. Poor piss drinking Rupert - man never had a chance.
Born Guilty is one the most uneven movies in the past decade. There may be a semblance of a film in here somewhere. I can imagine a guy in Los Angeles getting annoyed at his mom from all the way across the country. Throw in the bad girlfriend, work struggles, and the arrival of an old friend, and there could be a rom-com buried somewhere beneath the clutter. But first, you have to lose piss drinking Rupert.
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