You know you’re in trouble when a film starring Frank Langella has reached its peak as Elliot Gould compares watching Langella to watching linoleum dry underneath a microscope…on acid. Yes, that was the one time when the press/industry audience at last night’s screening of Richard Ledes’ The Caller groaned together, reaffirming my faith in humanity and showing their appreciation for the abysmal and truly excruciating would-be corporate neo-noir. After Langella’s flat-out amazing performance in Andrew Wagner’s quietly terrific Starting Out in the Evening, it’s impossible to imagine why he’d need to do work-for-hire other than someone has naked pictures of him and he needs his dignity back in a bad way. The film won’t help him much in that department, dressing him up in a business suit and a ridiculous pair of shades that make him look like Ray Charles’ albino nephew, which isn’t that bad of a look for someone who must’ve been blind if he says he read the script before acting in this turd.
Rather than continue to insult both your intelligence and Frank Langella’s career choices, I’ll describe The Caller as a posturing 9/11 thriller about the consequences of…um…love? I’m honestly not sure what the film is harping about except to say that innocence is lost, our country has gone to hell and the one’s responsible are the analysts who gave the information to the men with pockets deep enough to finance war and global ruin in general. Ledes and Alain-Didier Weill’s script condescends to the audience like they were talking to a class of second graders. If you don’t believe me, just look to the gut-churningly manipulative flashbacks to WW2 that frame the film. Young Jimmy (Axel Feldmann) flees from the Nazis with his brother Lulu (Gregory Ellis) while their mother and father are cut down. Flash-forward to the present-day, where Jimmy (Langella), a consultant working with a big energy firm, submits accurate figures instead of doctored ones to his company’s clients, knowingly forcing the company to “buy some art.” In case you don’t get what that mean or are just in general hard of thinking, the corporate goon calling for Jimmy’s blood repeats himself and the camera closes up of him….dramatically, of course.
Jimmy hires Dave (Elliott Gould), a mouth-breathing private dick that belongs on the moldering, yellow pages of the cheapest dime novels. He’s a sensitive observer (ie: a bird-watcher) and hence Jimmy takes him on to follow him around, not telling Dave that he’s watching his employer. From there Dave takes a trip through territory that Paul Auster turned inside-out in his The New York Trilogy, complete with a big-breasted song bird (Laura Harring), a jive-talking elderly mother (Helen Stenborg) and Lila, (Annabel Sosa), a naïve but helpful kid. With the help of numerous boulder-sized breadcrumbs, Dave uncovers Jimmy’s complicity in aiding mass murder and the plot against his life.
In Ledes’ eyes, noir has an obligation to today’s audience as a kind of fairy tale for adults. “Why are fairy tales only for kids,” Sosa asks Dave, undoubtedly using all her strength to keep herself from breaking the fourth wall and start speechifying about what’s goin’ on. While relevance certainly can have its place within a neo-noir setting, this clearly isn’t the film to do it. The metaphors are obnoxious and unenlightening, the characters ulcer-inducing and save for Langella and Stenborg, the acting is all-around terrible--although when Stenborg tries out her French accent, look out!
The Caller picks up right where Nicolas Klotz’s Heartbeat Detector recently left off. Detector, an aesthetically effective but over-reaching corporate noir, ties together the corporate machine with the Nazis even more explicitly than Ledes’ dares. Both films fail to make its mixed metaphors work (Can someone explain to me what hearing a collaborator’s confession accomplishes other than raising the audience’s awareness of the unbridled evil or downsizing or corporate pressure put on number-crunchers for all of a few hours? Anyone?) because it’s just too easy to vilify the big business monolith.
As jaded as it sounds, we’ve heard the story spun a million times already and while we definitely need it told to us a few more times before it sinks in, offering the audience a literal sacrificial lamb is neither entertaining nor edifying—look for it in the last scene on the subway. Jimmy’s big secret from WW2 is a lesson he learned watching a concentration camp victim die in torrential rain. As the dying man gives up the ghost, he makes a rough, wet cough, his last ragged gasp of breath. We expect blood to well up from his mouth but none comes, just more water.