| If the vast majority of the physical environment and almost all other inhabitants of the known universe suddenly vanished, possibly forever, how might one react?
This isn’t merely a hypothetical question in director Vincenzo Natali’s Nothing, but it may as well be considering how superficially it is pondered. From a talented filmmaker like Natali, who previously delivered clever, low-budget science fiction in Cube and Cypher, it’s a case of an excellent premise unjustifiably squandered.
When the mounting pressures of an indifferent, even hostile, society begin to overwhelm co-enabling bachelor-boy roommates David (David Hewlett) and Andrew (Andrew Miller), they find themselves wishing the outside world would just disappear. Happily, at least for them, it does. Unhappily, particularly for the rest of us, the script seems to have vanished along with everything else.
What remains is a shrill buddy comedy distinguished primarily by its setting, a blank, unpopulated void of spongy tofu-like consistency. (Resist critical comparisons! Resist!) Here, our two neurotically dysfunctional leads will pass the majority of their days bickering, and occasionally interrupting their bouts of X-Box to ponder the strange limbo they now occupy. Imagine The Odd Couple set, literally, in the middle of nowhere and you’ll begin to see how a scenario can be at once inventively novel and woefully cliché.
Situation comedy is not predisposed to the sort of existential inquiry Natali has in mind, and perhaps it is just that tension between the philosophical and the banal that ultimately undermines Nothing. When Oscar and Felix – er, I mean David and Andrew – discover their own loathing has created their predicament and that they have the power to hate away their troubles, the idea is never explored in its complexity. Perhaps Natali should have heeded his concern, voiced in the DVD bonus materials, that the concept was not grounds for an entire feature.
Then again, other recent films have explored similar territory much more successfully. Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, posits memory erasure as a criterion for happiness. Gus Van Sant’s Gerry, on the other hand, explores the Beckettian dualities of personality disorder in a more or less empty desert landscape. And then there is Natali’s own debut, Cube, a sci-fi thriller that is both intelligent and terrifying in its exploration of being and nothingness.
All of these are much more worthwhile than his present offering, which may just leave you feeling, well, empty. |
Copyright ©2005 FFWD. All rights reserved.