Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: The Vicious Kind

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they discuss their experience while smoking cartons of cigarettes. This is The Instant Movie Club.

This week we’ll be discussing The Vicious Kind – an Independent Spirit Award nominee, starring Adam Scott (Parks and Recreation, Party Down) as a guy whose emotions “go haywire” when he meets his brother’s new girlfriend.

Next Week: Let Me In - The American remake of the Swedish vampire thriller starring the little kid from The Road and Hit-Girl.

SPOILERS BELOW!

Jeremiah White: It wasn’t until after watching The Vicious Kind that I realized Neil LaBute had an executive producer credit and is something of a mentor to director Lee Toland Krieger. Krieger’s characters immediately call to mind the awful people that populate LaBute films, but perhaps the most significant similarity between the directors is that afterward, it’s interesting to parse out the murky motivations and decode the erratic behavior of those characters. Like them or hate them, LaBute, and apparently Krieger, movies lend themselves very well to after movie discussion that goes beyond the typical “I liked this, I didn’t like this.” Well, LaBute’s earlier work at least. His Wicker Man-Lakeview Terrace-Death At a Funeral trilogy seems like some sort of studio experiment.

You’d be forgiven for mistaking The Vicious Kind for a stereotypical indie family drama where walls are broken down, estrangements ended, and the healing power of the family unit is reinforced. The final scenes certainly retroactively try to paint the movie in this light, but The Vicious Kind is really about the curious relationship between Emma (Brittany Snow) and her boyfriend’s older brother Caleb (Adam Scott). Scott gets to do the majority of the talking and dramatic heavy lifting, but Snow’s understated performance gives Emma considerable depth. She is every bit the unsure college girlfriend visiting her beau’s family, trying to fit in, make a good impression and not rock the boat, but we never forget that there is a whole other life, essentially a mystery, behind that façade.

I spent much of the film dreading the moment when Emma would throw caution (and common sense) to the wind and run into Caleb’s arms. For a while, I was convinced that it wouldn’t happen. Emma was too turned off by Caleb’s semi-psychotic behavior and, regardless of how she truly felt about the younger brother, too nice to do something so malicious. Of course Caleb and Emma do eventually have sex, but Krieger doesn’t let it become a swelling-music moment of triumph or romance. The audience, and the characters, never lose sight of how fucked up it is. Still, I can’t help but think that Emma’s behavior reinforces the idea that all women are whores, which is one of the first lines of dialogue in the movie, and seemingly the cornerstone of Caleb’s belief system for much of the runtime. It’s an ugly, reprehensible viewpoint, though its bite is lessened by the fact that Caleb is certainly more callous, and vicious, than Emma.

BTW, do you think two people who are experiencing palpable sexual tension have ever fallen directly on top of one another? Has anyone at all ever fallen like that? It seems unnatural, yet it happens in movies all the time.

Are we having fun yet?!

Jeff Hart: To answer your question, Jeremiah, yes. People experiencing palpable sexual tension fall on top of each other all the time. It happens to me every time I ride the subway.

How about that Adam Scott, huh? His performance here is top notch. On the page, Caleb must read like a complete monster. He’s an unhinged insomniac that’s handling his recent break-up in the worst way possible – for instance, by snapping pictures of him spite-fucking a prostitute and leaving them on his ex’s doorstep. If his opening monologue on whores isn’t ugly enough for you, how about his hemming up of Brittany Snow in the cereal aisle? The character is horrible and yet, without losing any of that edge, Scott manages to imbue Caleb with a charm that makes us almost root for him. In lesser hands, the Caleb character would’ve made The Vicious Kind all but unwatchable.

Instead, thanks particularly to Scott, we end up with a complicated indie drama that’s a great conversation starter. Like Jeremiah, I spent most of the film waiting for Snow to succumb to Scott’s anti-charms but, when the moment finally came, I still wasn’t convinced she’d go through with it. There’s a really great moment from Snow in the bedroom before Scott arrives where she’s contemplating exactly what she’s about to do. She doesn’t speak, just nervously considers taking off her shirt. It’s a painfully long moment that Krieger really lets develop, and it’s the sort of scene that begs for viewer interpretation.

It’s interesting where The Vicious Kind leaves our characters. Our two most abhorrent players – Scott, and his formerly estranged philandering father JK Simmons – are on their way to a reconcilement, based largely on Scott totally screwing over his younger brother. Meanwhile, blissfully ignorant younger bro and recently deflowered Snow are on their way back to college where, if Snow’s tears are any indication, hearts are going to be broken. In Krieger’s world, shitty people reach catharsis by inflicting their troubles on the next generation.

Much like with his mentor LaBute, I find Krieger’s worldview slightly worrisome. The Vicious Kind revels in human ugliness and seems to take great pleasure in expressing the misogynistic diatribes of its lead character. And, while there is a hastily tacked on revelation that Scott’s dead mother was not the unfaithful bitch she’s made out to be for much of the film, there’s no real refutation from Krieger that women are not all whores. Krieger walks the very thin line between condone and condemn. What results are starkly drawn albeit often hideous characters whose collisions, when taken with a grain of salt, make for compelling viewing.

Next Week: Let Me In