By Mekado Murphy
Lee Daniels on 'The Paperboy': Lee Daniels, the director of “The Paperboy,” discusses his thriller based on the Pete Dexter novel.
To attempt a simple description of “The Paperboy” is to risk exhausting the normal critical vocabulary. The movie, directed by Lee Daniels and adapted from a novel by Pete Dexter, is — for starters — a domestic melodrama, a Southern Gothic, a legal thriller, a coming-of-age-story, a high-toned sexploitation picture and an earnest lesson in journalistic ethics and race relations. None of that quite captures it, I’m afraid. “The Paperboy” is what cinema scholars (and speakers fluent in the film’s native idiom) might call a hot mess.
I mean that at least partly as praise. In the hands of Mr. Daniels — who directed “Precious Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” and “Shadowboxer” — Mr. Dexter’s complex tale pulsates with wayward desire and confused motivation. Not a few of the characters are driven to distraction by the swampy Florida heat and their own lust, and the movie itself seems to share their state of sweaty agitation. It is by turns lurid, humid, florid, languid and stupid, but it is pretty much all id all the time.
Visually, “The Paperboy” is a haze of shimmery, washed-out colors (shot by Roberto Schaefer), vintage clothes (it takes place in 1969) and sweaty bodies. There is quite a lot of interesting stuff to see. You will not see London. You will not see France. But you will see Zac Efron’s underpants. Nicole Kidman’s, too, and also Matthew McConaughey’s backside. But Mr. Efron is by far the favored object of the camera’s hungry gaze.
He plays Jack Jansen, the younger son of a small-town newspaperman (Scott Glenn). A former high school swimming champion, Jack vacillates between sloth and seething disaffection. His father has checked out, his Yankee would-be stepmother (Nealla Gordon) is a snob and a racist, and Jack’s only friend is the family’s maid, Anita (Macy Gray), who also supplies the film’s retrospective voice-over narration.
Ms. Gray and Mr. Efron’s scenes together — sometimes playful, sometimes awkward, sometimes painful — provide a few moments when “The Paperboy” feels anchored in, and curious about, an actual social reality. Ms. Gray’s performance, by far the least showy, does not exactly ground the film but at least introduces a hint of emotional gravity. And Jack’s relationship with Anita, even more than the one between the Emma Stone and Viola Davis characters in “The Help,” conveys some of the complicated intimacy that existed between African-American domestic workers and their white employers in the civil-rights-era South.
But most of the movie is devoted to the crazy doings of white people in various states of inebriation, rage or erotic frenzy — or (why not?) all three at once. A particular scene, in which Jack is stung by jellyfish, and his pal Charlotte Bless (Ms. Kidman) offers treatment, has already achieved some notoriety, though it’s hardly the strangest or most shocking moment.
Ms. Kidman, garishly made up and harshly lighted, is a vampy, campy whirlwind: a femme fatale, a good-time girl and a tragic diva with a husky drawl and teased hair. Charlotte, who has a special affection for prisoners, has promised herself to Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack), an uncouth alligator hunter convicted of killing a hated local lawman. During one jailhouse visit Charlotte and Hillary pantomime oral sex across a crowded room, an encounter that manages to be grotesque, absurd and also kind of hot.
That mixture — with a dash of social conscience and a splash of gruesome violence stirred in — pretty much sums up the feverish mood of “The Paperboy.” Accounting for the plot is a bit more difficult, since coherent storytelling is even lower on the list of Mr. Daniels’s priorities than protecting Mr. Efron’s modesty. Jack’s brother, Ward (Mr. McConaughey), a crusading journalist, shows up with a colleague, Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo), to investigate the apparent miscarriage of justice that sent the cretinous Hillary to the slammer.
The mutual resentment between Jack and Yardley, tinged with racial animosity and macho rivalry, is one of many interesting and volatile undercurrents in this tangled and chaotic movie. Mr. Daniels is much more interested in sensation than in conventional suspense, so the murder mystery is pushed into the background.
Which is just as well. You can find a neat, serviceable whodunit on basic cable or the paperback rack at an airport bookstore. A hot mess like this, even if it makes you dizzy and a little queasy, is a rarer phenomenon, worth seeking out if only so you can say you saw it with your own eyes.
“The Paperboy” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). I honestly don’t know where to start.
The Paperboy
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Lee Daniels; written by Pete Dexter and Mr. Daniels, based on the novel by Mr. Dexter; director of photography, Roberto Schaefer; edited by Joe Klotz; music by Mario Grigorov; production design by Daniel T. Dorrance; costumes by Caroline Eselin-Schaefer; produced by Hilary Shor, Mr. Daniels, Avi Lerner, Ed Cathell III and Cassian Elwes; released by Millennium Films. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes.
WITH: Matthew McConaughey (Ward Jansen), Zac Efron (Jack Jansen), David Oyelowo (Yardley Acheman), Macy Gray (Anita Chester), John Cusack (Hillary Van Wetter), Nealla Gordon (Ellen Guthrie), Scott Glenn (W. W. Jansen) and Nicole Kidman (Charlotte Bless).
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