(Warning : Contains spoilers)
My son is a movie lover and although our tastes don’t always match up, I was intrigued by his enthusiasm for ‘God Bless America,’ currently playing on Netflix. The double ‘OMG’ is what did it. Once again, I knew very little going in, although I recalled having seen the trailer last year and it registered in my brain as a ‘mad at the world shot ’em up.’ Which, it kind of was. But it was so much more than that.
Joel Murray, by virtue of age and face, was a beautiful casting choice as the irritated and troubled Frank, a man who’s reached the end of his rope. He was believable and impassioned, delivering his lines with conviction in his eyes, speaking directly to the heart of anyone who ever mourned the death of old-fashioned decency and kindness. Even mired in the irony of this movie, he connected strongly with me, making it clear that producer/director Bobcat Goldthwait was looking to be taken seriously here – despite the ‘dark comedy’ listing.
From the opening scenes of ‘God Bless America,’ we are on notice that the movie will be unconventional and violent. Frank fantasizes picking off a screaming baby as it’s tossed in the air like a skeet disc, and as the screen is splattered with blood and guts, I laughed. Not a comfortable laugh, but a ‘what in the hell?’ one. The same one that sold me on ‘Breaking Bad’ after they dissolved a man in acid. There is a very delicate edge to morbid humor, but Goldthwait manages to dance on that line by making almost all the victims in this movie decidedly annoying.
Beleaguered Frank is a migraine-suffering no one, walking from his 1/2 address home into a shallow world where ‘people don’t have conversations anymore. They just regurgitate the things they’ve seen on TV – Celebrity Gossip, Sports and Pop Politics.” Long divorced Frank is hated by his screeching daughter, and after being fired from his job and diagnosed with a brain tumor, he puts a gun in his mouth. But in the seconds before he shots himself, he catches a spoiled, whining teen on a TV reality show and gets the gratifying idea that he should take her with him.
There’s a guilty pleasure in seeing irritating people get blown away, let’s face it, and I laughed each and every time he pumped a bullet into someone. It’s the kind of thing that seems okay when it’s all a fantasy, but too often in ‘God Bless America’ you’re reminded of real life psychos, (especially when the shootings occur in a movie theater,) and it starts to get a little harder to laugh.
Frank is joined along the way by the young and wistful Roxy, an adorable if hyper, doe-eyed Gidget clone, played by Tara Lynne Barr. Roxy, too, is mad at the world, but for differing reasons, although reasons matter little by this point. Between the two of them, pretty much everyone is a target as they start to list to each other what type of person they should kill. It’s a list of personality traits we all hate but will never recognize or acknowledge in ourselves. But it’s also a list of things we tolerate in our daily lives.
(*Note: I started to find myself a little annoyed at how long they wanted me to suspend my disbelief, since they are never once pursued or even looked at funny by police, despite their glaringly yellow crime car and unique facial and age characteristics being plastered all over TV. But for the movies needs, it had to be postponed…indefinitely I guess.)
From midway, the movie starts to pick up an overly preachy feel, and that’s where the irony sets in. If anyone should appreciate the idea behind this movie, it is me. I am fully qualified. I don’t own a television and haven’t for nearly five years now. I am as anti-annoying media as you can get. But a human life is a human life and the nit picking starts to grow thin. I guess my point is…if you don’t like what you’re seeing on TV, you have the option of turning it off, and while it’s hard to tune out the mindless media babble of office co-workers, that will always be the better solution than taking their lives. You don’t complain to someone about their propensity for spewing hatred with a gun pointed at their face. That is not the ‘kindness’ Frank truly sought at the beginning of this film. It’s the descent of a soul already lost.
The killing spree continues until Frank’s rage reaches an apex, when he kills a man not with his gun but with his bare hands. That our heroes go down in a hail of bullets at the end is appropriate, despite an ‘Of Mice and Men’ dream of restarting their lives on a small farm in France. It has to end that way. By this point, they’ve killed a few innocents, and their crimes cannot go unpunished. While not exactly the modern day Bonnie and Clyde an idealistic Roxy likes to pretend, they are a brutal representation of human folly, both for and against.
This movie was so much deeper than I imagined it would be and I completely understood it. I appreciate that it never patronized by adding any kind of relationship between the two of them and for Frank’s unrelenting values. It was a sad movie for a comedy really. And very much unforgettable.
I loved it.
GAMINGIRL 