Rating: D
Dir: Ross Patterson
Star: Jessie Wiseman, Alanna Ubach, Barry Bostwick, Jesse Merlin
I could muse here on the subjective nature of comedy, because it feels like this is certainly supposed to be funny, and the fact more than a quarter of the rating on the IMDb are 10/10, suggests that some people are finding it a riotous laff-fest. However, the next most popular grade is 1/10, proving that others disagree. I wouldn’t go quite that low: I did smirk now and again, with the presence of Lin Shaye as the elderly Helen Keller, telling her story to her descendants, meriting a point or two. But it’s likely more a swing and a miss then FDR: American Badass!, which Patterson also wrote and with which it shares a similarly loose approach to biography. And wolves.
Here, the Keller family are attacked by the titular lupines, a brutal assault which leaves the young Helen (Wiseman) without the use of her eyes and ears. With the help of family friend Anne Sullivan (Ubach) and, to a lesser degree, gay brother William (Merlin), Helen has to come to terms with her disability. Mostly by bumping into things, and learning to hear people when they speak into her fingers. Then, aided by local wolf-hunter Jonathan (Bostwick), she prepares to take revenge on the animals responsible for inflicting a 40% reduction on her number of working senses. All of this is overseen by the movie’s putative director, St. James St. James (Patterson), who is an author and Iditarod Race champion as well as a film-maker, and who introduces the… experience.
I dunno, man. Reading the above, I feel it should have been considerably more amusing than it was. To me, it illustrates the fine line between funny – say, something like The VelociPastor – and not. Though perhaps if this had been accompanied by the same selection of chemically-flavoured miniatures of vodka as Pastor, it conceivably might have fared better. What you have is certainly a good set-up for comedy, being utterly ludicrous and entirely irreverent to a sacred cow of history. However, there’s only so long you can watch Keller staggering around the set, knocking things off tables, before you start making hurry-up gestures toward the screen. Thereafter, it’s only sporadically entertaining, mostly when it’s being HK: American Badass!
I’ll admit I did laugh – okay, smirk – when Helen is blundering her way around a diner, and the customers start tossing out Helen Keller jokes (even if they didn’t include my personal favourite. How did Helen Keller pierce her ears? Answering the stapler). The effects are self-aware in how bad they are, with the wolves depicted in a blenderized mix of stock footage. bad CGI and stuffed animals, to an effect which ranges from endearingly bad to just bad. But there really is not enough of the “vs.” component, with too much of the picture spent in rather dull chit-chat, or Bostwick demonstrating why his career peaked in 1975. To those who enjoyed this: good for you. I’ll be sticking to Blind Fury.