Spinning Man (2018) Review

Life is okay. You’ve got a nice job teaching and your peers respect you, that’s okay. Your wife is beautiful, relatively unobjectionable and she lets you do her in the utility room a few times a week, that’s okay. Your children are nice, like to wear capes and eat candy, that’s okay. Life is okay, if a little mundane, which is okay.

But wait!

Via the television news you’re told a young girl has gone missing in the woods by a lake. Nothing to do with you though is it? Don’t be absurd, you’re an upstanding member of society. A perfectly unremarkable existence is in the process of being led here!

But wait!

What’s that bubbling beneath the surface of your seemingly prosaic socially acceptable suburban american life? Demons? A troubled soul? A chequered past? Maybe all is not as it seems...

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I let out a yawn just typing that. This rivetingly original premise is the basis of the Spinning Man. Based on the novel of the same name, which I believe to be taught, suspenseful and actually quite good, this picture is a media student-esque stab at portent. Is there any acting talent present? Yes. Are there worthy themes, the concept of truth and the fallibility of memory, to be explored within the context of this narrative? Yes. Is the director a man who, in his graduation yearbook, was likely to have been marked ‘most likely to attempt and fail to make ‘serious’ cinema’? Almost fucking definitely.

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Somehow trying to take this all in, you pause for rest in the dining room of your nice middle class home. Sat bathed in a fragile, pale green light you close your eyes. Drift away.

Things aren’t okay. You’re actually drunk, sexually assaulting young girls over which you have a duty of care and physically attacking inanimate waste disposal units. Quick cut, you’re back in the room.

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Oooh, subversive, eh? Did you like what I did with the unusual green light in the dining room back there? That’s an obvious, irritating, heavy handed motif I’ll return to frequently throughout the rest of this plodding tale because we all know that gently coloured filtered light adds gravity to the words of actors rather than having them work from a script that’s actually compelling. So when we go from a scene in normal light to one in which we’ve put filters over the lens you’ll know the script is going to get heavy, man.

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By the way, that subject you teach? Philosophy. I mean like, what is the truth anyway right? Like, subjectivity and stuff, yeah? Perception and process, is that right? Something like that isn’t it? Yeah, something like that. That’s what you keep telling the students anyway. Oh, and the police. They’re sniffing around now, the chequered past and all that but your mastery of language and articulation of philosophical concepts should throw them off the scent. Ha. Because that was nice little tête-à-tête you had with the detective there wasn’t it?. Both in the same business, looking for truth etc. Ha. No! They can’t search your car for evidence. Police 0 - You 1. Ha.

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Much like the kind of discussion that surrounds the literary worlds concern around the ‘accessibility’ of a work people can often deride cinema or television drama for being ‘self important’. It’s difficult territory to explore. Is the creator simply trying to convey ideas that not every member of the audience understands? Is it inherently wrong or contrary in some way to try and imbue the art with some conceptualisations if it’s going to alienate sections of an audience?

Spinning Man smashes this paradigm with earthquake levels of subtly. It aspires to be clever but fails in such brilliant, slow motion car crash style you almost admire the resulting wreckage. You can’t lambast it as being self indulgent because it fails on its own terms, failing to be indulgent in the first place. The clunky use of visual symbolism is almost painful to describe. The detective and the suspect are playing a game of cat and mouse (they aren’t really because this is one paced rubbish with no suspense but that’s the cliched thing they’re going for so stick with me here) so we see philosopher man actually going to the shop to buy and then lay out mouse traps around his home. There’s one scuttling around the utility room apparently, ooo allegory. His family are growing suspicious of him, distancing themselves emotionally from the flawed patriarch so we hear of the family rabbits escaping their hutch. Seriously? How are we supposed to take this potato print kind of film making with a straight face.

The possibility that this is art gone so horribly wrong maybe it actually is art is very real. The dialogue is like having your ears mangled through the 19th century mincer of a country house. So coarse, absent of rhythm and intrigue are the exchanges it’s virtually impossible to find anything to cling on to. Firstly, having two grown men muse about the nature of the truth and name dropping philosophers a couple of times here and there doesn’t add a philosophical bent to the film. The extent to which we’re asked to take this seriously is absurd and by the time we reach the limp conclusion, almost pathetic. Rather than diffuse the dialogue of the entire picture with allusions to such grand thematic washes, the sort of which might at least contextualise the more on-the-nose references, we have standard thriller fayre, interjected with awkward, clumsy exchanges that then come across as devastatingly ham fisted. It’s easier to ask for that than it is to execute it well, absolutely, but with that being the case, unless it’s right don’t make the film.

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The cops are closing in. But you didn’t do it?! But random intersecting flashbacks/visions of a girl in the woods and the pile up of circumstantial evidence suggest maybe you did?! Wouldn’t it be utterly predictable and spectacularly convenient for the police if at this precise moment your character flaws and past indiscretions that it was obvious were going to be there behind the seemingly perfect life from the start of this sordid affair suddenly came to light and put you even more sharply in the frame? Yeah, yeah that would be, surely that won't happen. Anyway, your wife believes you. Does your wife believe you? Maybe she did. Now, maybe she doesn’t. Your colleagues believe you. Do your colleagues believe you? Maybe they did. Now, maybe they don’t. What about the detective? Does he believe you? Quite frankly, who gives a fuck at this point. What were you saying about truth and perception and stuff again? Probably something to do with that isn’t it? Talk your way out of this paper bag you cunt.

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I mean, if you just came for the greatest hits, it’s great. The plot line is so paint by numbers thriller it’s unbelievable. All your favorites, all the ones you remembered from the last cookie cutter compilation of unimaginative sludge are here (featuring bonus track - EDGY FLASHBACKS). If it marketed itself as a plain old tin of cinematic beans I’d have no complaints, well, I probably would but whatever. However, the label on the tin says Guy Pearce (referred to as Guy from here on out), Minnie Driver, Pierce Brosnan. I’ve been lured in with the promise of quality, of sausages, spice and a rich tomato sauce. The marquee names of the leads only adds an extra layer of disappointment to the experience. The feeling that if the pieces had been in place for them to excel they could have done looms large. Here you have the cinematic equivalent of asking Leo Messi to bewitch and beguile with his greatest ever performance but through the medium of Subbuteo.

For such a low budget escapade the list of names involved is truly impressive. One assumes the intrigue of the source material is what convinced them to take the plunge and commit. The knowledge that other big names were pinning part of their reputations to the project as well acting like a comforting safety blanket. A reassurance that maybe even if the style and feel of the thing isn’t quite right the acting will elevate it. It wouldn’t be the first film to fail whilst featuring strong performances but even some of the performances here are unsteady.

Driver, playing the perfect man’s wife, either wasn’t bothered at all or has acting tourettes. The failed attempts to get the audience to have some sympathy for her predicament are undermined by the fact you can’t believe what she says because she doesn’t look like she believes it either. On a few notable occasions the flickering spark of something resembling acting threatens to break out across her face only to be instantly smothered by the monotonous reeling off of crap lines whilst staring at the brilliantly befuddled expressions of Guy, the titular self-pity wallowing spinning philosopher/potential murdering child rapist.

The process of carrying out Guy’s role is much more difficult on paper. The calculated attack and release that’s needed to portray someone who’s obviously being presented to us as such a ‘complex’ individual is tough. The ‘man who has it all’ with a possible dark secret that could cost him everything isn’t exactly a unique character arc but the addition of the jumbled philosophical slant confuses things. In theory, we’re supposed to believe that there are lots of mental plates simultaneously spinning in this man’s head at any one time but you get the impression Guy is just thinking about washing said plates and stacking them tidily in the cupboard. The extremes of this performance put him in complete opposition to Driver but with the same result. Firstly, there's the deadpan stare into space whilst flashbacks spring up. Not only does this not constitute character development it’s a boring and ineffective trope to employ, which it is, time and again. Sat at his desk, flashback. Sat in his car, flashback. Sat on the beach, flashback. Sat by the kayak rental place, flashback. Secondly, there’s the confused wimper. Bottom lip trembling, glassy eyed, as he searches for answers whilst the audience searches for purpose. What is the meaning of life? I have no idea but I got a little bit closer to finding the thread whilst my mind wandered off from the monotony of this film.

Whilst watching Guy and Driver resembles seeing escaped lunatics miming a game of imaginary football from an office block window, or chimps raised with crocodiles thinking they rule the banks of the Nile, Brosnan attempts to anchor things down. Playing a detective, though his look here makes him an uncanny double of Colonel Sanders, he wades through the infinite inanity of this bland sea of ineffectuality at least looking regnant. Overall his performance is solid and he emerges with dignity intact even if a biopic of the fried chicken innovator would have been more welcome than this. Defiantly, he’s attempted to drag this wreck to something resembling mediocrity through sheer force of personality. The silences that punctuate his dialogue, which is delivered with intent, are meaningful and he dovetails well with Sean Blakemore who plays his more cynical deputy but who unfortunately gives up screentime to make way for more of the unnecessary padding that bulks the picture out. Brosnan’s presence on screen elevates the scenes in which he features and his humouring of Guy’s wibblings as a cop looking to unpick the detail of the case are Theroux-esque in their defense lowering style. Unfortunately, everything around him is so uniformly poor that he comes off, through no fault of his own, as a bit of a show off. The talented kid in class that we all know is better than everyone else so we hope he’ll phone it in slightly in an effort not to make everyone else look bad. Like a man earnestly doing his favourite scenes from Shakespeare’s late romantic plays in the middle of an episode of Sesame Street.

Contemplate for a moment, why? Why make this a reality?

Having been catapulted into such a thin, rarified strata of boredom watching this, wondering whether or not you can seek compensation from whoever is behind this ill conceived pile of star studded rubble will be the only thing that leaves your head spinning. That and the fact that the death of a girl is basically exploited for the purpose of allowing a white middle class intellectual who's bored of his family to have his pseudo-intellectualism indulged for ninety minutes.

I’m going to lie down in a green lit room.