Buster's Mal Heart
Directed by: Sarah Adina Smith
Written by: Sarah Adina Smith
Starring: Rami Malek, DJ Qualls, Kate Lyn Sheil, Sukha Belle Potter, Toby Huss, Lin Shaye, Mark Kelly, Bruce Bundy, Teresa Yenque, Sandra Ellis Lafferty, Nicholas Pryor, Lily Gladstone, Chris Torma, Franklin Ruehl
Drama/Mystery/Thriller - 96 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 2 May 2017
Written by: Sarah Adina Smith
Starring: Rami Malek, DJ Qualls, Kate Lyn Sheil, Sukha Belle Potter, Toby Huss, Lin Shaye, Mark Kelly, Bruce Bundy, Teresa Yenque, Sandra Ellis Lafferty, Nicholas Pryor, Lily Gladstone, Chris Torma, Franklin Ruehl
Drama/Mystery/Thriller - 96 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 2 May 2017
The man who gets no sleep is an impressionable man. His defenses are down. He lacks the faculties to keep out the extraneous, the off-the-wall, even the absurd. Splice that with acute personal tragedy and you’ve got the kindling for a breakdown you don’t come back from. In Sarah Adina Smith’s Buster’s Mal Heart, a title guaranteed to scare off most window-shoppers, Buster does more than break down; he appears to split in two. At least, that is my impression. Sarah Adina Smith wants each and every movie-goer to form their own opinion and then fight it out later. She will give you nothing but the set-up, and even then, it’s up to you what is factual and what is not even there.
Some directors can get away with this. David Lynch earns accolades to this day for Mulholland Dr. (2001), a film entire textbooks study to no definite conclusions. However, where Mulholland Dr. was absorbing, beautiful, and hypnotic, Buster’s Mal Heart is irritating, vague beyond measure, and downright boring. Mulholland Dr. had some sharp corners you could identify and definite hand holds to grasp. Buster’s Mal Heart is a blank slate without mass and shape; you can be sure of nothing. There is no intriguing dialogue to fall back on, no characters to identify with, and a time-hopping chronology which makes everything a pretzel. Oh, and there’s the main character stranded in a boat which may be a metaphor. I don’t know.
Some directors can get away with this. David Lynch earns accolades to this day for Mulholland Dr. (2001), a film entire textbooks study to no definite conclusions. However, where Mulholland Dr. was absorbing, beautiful, and hypnotic, Buster’s Mal Heart is irritating, vague beyond measure, and downright boring. Mulholland Dr. had some sharp corners you could identify and definite hand holds to grasp. Buster’s Mal Heart is a blank slate without mass and shape; you can be sure of nothing. There is no intriguing dialogue to fall back on, no characters to identify with, and a time-hopping chronology which makes everything a pretzel. Oh, and there’s the main character stranded in a boat which may be a metaphor. I don’t know.
The character you will not identify with is Buster (Rami Malek, Need for Speed), even though his given name is Jonas. Buster is what the locals call the man stalking the Montana outback breaking into million dollar vacation homes to squat while the owners are away. He leaves the cabins mostly clean and as he found then minus the odd defecation in the cookware. Buster sports a mountain-man beard, the scraggly, unkempt hair of a vagrant, and calls up local radio stations and phone sex lines to rant and rave about the coming inversion; what the rest of us call Y2K. This is our sharpest clue to what year we're living in.
Buster used to be Jonas, an overnight concierge at an out of the way hotel with a wife and toddler. Jonas suffers from the most intense lack of sleep a human can endure. The bags under his eyes obscure the bottom half of his blood-shot, thousand-yard staring eyeballs. He shuffles around the empty hotel vacuuming already clean floors, deals with cantankerous customers, and comes home to a sniping mother-in-law to spend a few hour with his little girl before he starts the grind all over again. This little girl played by Sukha Belle Potter is the best two-year old actor I have ever seen; this girl is phenomenal; either that, or Smith knows how to direct children extremely well. Jonas appears to love his wife, dotes on his child, and yearns for the day he can buy a parcel of land so their family may be truly free, as in self-sufficient, and away from society’s rules and regulations. Jonas has a hardcore libertarian streak somewhere beneath the despair.
Jonas’s entertainment during his break time looks like a public access channel; his favorite program is a man detailing the coming inversion of the universe. Black holes are like butt holes; they are all controlled by sphincters. *This is real dialogue from the film folks.* When a meandering guy (DJ Qualls) claiming to be the “last free man on Earth” shows up trying to scam a free room, Jonas gives him the time of day because he spouts nonsense about inversions and up being down as well. What Sarah Adina Smith is doing with all of this is making us tense. She’s teasing us. We all know something is going to disrupt the tedium, probably something bad. Every time I thought we had the reached the point, Smith pushes it back a bit further playing with the suspense.
Yes, the gruesome event happens and it leads to Jonas's, now Buster’s, roaming mountain-man phase. Unfortunately for us, once we haphazardly piece all of this together from the patchwork timeline, our patience is gone. I left wondering what the hell the point of this movie is. Is it about mental illness? Does Smith have a message about society pinning us down and stifling our instinctual tendency to wander? Wouldn’t know. The last person giving us any answers is the lady who wrote and directed this thing.
Check out this gem from a note Smith included in the press notes: “It’s a story of a spiritual fission catalyzed by a cry against the gods... a cry so loud that the fabric of spacetime caught on fucking fire. It’s a meditation on individual responsibility in a mechanistic universe. Whose fault is it that Jonah was born with a malformed heart? Who should stand trial, the insane man or the universe that gave birth to him?” WTF over? If you’re going to try and pull a David Lynch, you’d better have the script and the filmmaking chops to back it up. Buster’s Mal Heart has neither; stay away from this garbage fire.
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