Three Films Make A Post: A sensational characterisation you wouldn't believe possible

The Darjeeling Limited (2007): I don’t usually write a lot about Wes Anderson’s films, because while I love most of them quite a bit, I don’t have much to say about them beyond noting my appreciation for his general aesthetic (and the guy’s films are nothing if not expressions of a single and very personal aesthetic), his curious ability to make films full of ironic distance that still seem to respect and portray human emotion in a stylized yet truthful manner. Why, he even gets me to watch a film about characters for whose little rich boy problems I’d have little patience otherwise like this one, and enjoy it.

Greenberg (2010): I’m somewhat more particular when it comes to the films of Noah Baumbach. About half of them I think are brilliant or borderline brilliant, the other half (say the confusingly beloved Mistress America or While We’re Young) I can’t stand at all.

One of the borderline brilliant ones is this one about the perils of being a supposed grown-up when you are perhaps not suited to it at all, embodied in a pretty fantastic performance by Ben Stiller (who is a properly good actor when he is acting instead of being Ben Stiller). The film also concerns itself with the perils of being a young woman who has had much of her confidence and self-esteem sucked out by life as a young, poor woman in late capitalist America as even more fantastically embodied by Greta Gerwig. As an actress, Gerwig has an incredible way of projecting telling degrees of awkwardness only comparable to the way Vincent Price could chew scenery to just the exact correct degree. Baumbach keeps some ironic distance here too, but where Anderson’s view is a bit more clinical, I believe Baumbach wants his characters to change and improve and be happy (to the degree being happy is possible for them) more often than not. As a viewer, I approve of this.

Stegman Is Dead (2017): Keeping with the comedy, though on a less critically acclaimed and less accomplished level, David Hyde’s film concerns a bunch of slightly eccentric criminals, killers etc, performing their merry dance of stupidity and mild violence while descending on the house of a porn producer (porn jokes are actually one of the film’s strengths) and other houses looking for a McGuffin in form of a video. It’s sometimes funny, sometimes going over the same couple of ideas over and over again, sometimes threatening to do something really interesting and crazy but never quite getting there.


It’s a generally likeable little film, though, not terribly cynical, not terribly involving, but certainly worth a friendly nod.

Zero Effect (1998)

Daryl Zero (Bill Pullman) is your typical eccentric master detective. When he’s not working on a case, he locks himself in his costly home to cower and whimper and write horrifying songs, only communicating with and through his pitiable assistant Steve Arlo (Ben Stiller, but don’t worry, he’s wasn’t that deeply unfunny “Ben Stiller” persona yet when this was made but rather a serviceable actor). Zero’s not exactly a people person, though once he works a case, he’s pretty good at emulating one, approaching the rest of humanity as something he has studied carefully, yet isn’t a true part of.

Zero is hired by a sleazy business tycoon named Gregory Stark (Ryan O’Neal) to get back some mysterious keys and solve a case of blackmail for him. Stark’s not exactly forthcoming with details, but then, as Arlo explains early on, in the end, Zero will find out everything anyway, including the mandatory dark secrets of the past. Why, he might even find out something about himself thanks to the case and ambulance driver Gloria Sullivan (Kim Dickens) who may or may not be involved in the whole affair.

By now, there’s hardly any cop or detective show running on TV that doesn’t feature some kind of eccentric/mentally ill/supernatural/perfectly idiotic detective, so the basic idea of Jake Kasdan’s Zero Effect doesn’t sound terribly fresh anymore from our benighted age. However, the eccentric Great Detective wasn’t actually invented by 00s television desperate to rip off Columbo (nor by Columbo itself). Even leaving that Great Detective aside, there are many more literary detectives – particularly outside the hardboiled genres – who are dysfunctional in various degrees. A serial character needs a gimmick after all. Going by the intelligent and often very inventive way he uses the genre and what comes with it, I’m reasonably sure Kasdan knows about this tradition rather well, so this is not a case of Hollywood using an old trope thinking it to be new.

Zero is a rather extreme case of dysfunctionality, isolated, pathologically afraid of everything and positioning himself as a complete outside observer of the world of humanity as he is. At first, it’s easy to believe the film will mostly play out as a comedy that’s going to use its protagonist’s eccentricity as an easy way to earn its laughs; the film does after all indeed get quite a few very funny scenes out of Zero’s curious habits and the inspired way Pullman portrays him. However, the longer the film goes on, the clearer it becomes how much more ambitious it is, and the simple comedy turns out to also be a rather well constructed mystery, a romance, a meditation about the nature of the figure of the Great Detective and his relations to the figure we know as The Woman, a poignant and somewhat hopeful film about loneliness and isolation and the way isolation caused by outside forces and the kind that come from inside can go hand in hand, and even a film concerned with questions of morality and justice. While this sounds like rather a lot for a single film to take on, Kasdan manages to do all of these questions and themes justice, seemingly with ease always finding the right thematic point to emphasise – as well as the right question to ask – and using every scene’s potential to its fullest. In the intelligence of the film and how easy Kasdan makes it look to apply his own, this is as good as direction gets; I have honestly no idea how this director ended up doing stuff like Bad Teacher for a living later on.

The film isn’t just clever and thoughtful, it is also emotionally satisfying, handling a romance that might feel like a complete cliché in a very convincing and natural manner. There’s also something pleasantly and effectively hopeful in the film’s emotional core, the idea that isolation can and will end, and that, while there’s not necessarily a glorious happy end waiting for the lonely, there’s hope and life even for those who only ever observe. And the best thing about it? It never feels too easy, dishonest, or disrespectful of its characters while doing it.


I’m not going to end this happy rambling about a wonderful film without giving Pullman a special nod. He does, after all, have the difficult job to not just portray a dysfunctional genius and the embodiment of an archetype and turn him into a human being, but also stands at the core of nearly all of the film’s shifts in tone and theme. He does this while making it look as easy as Kasdan does filmmaking.