Movie Review: God Bless America
Opening on a pitch-black fantasy of a wailing baby being thrown in the air and shot down like a skeet target, comedian-turned-filmmaker Bobcat Goldthwait pays blunt warning in the opening minutes of God Bless America – his screed against the tendencies toward cruelty and narcissism in modern American culture. Those easily offended would do well to stay away from this extreme (and extremely funny) cathartic revenge film with a surprising amount of heart at its center. Like Mike Judge’s underrated Idiocracy, Goldthwait’s film may have paltry production values, but needs to be seen by the very airheads it mercilessly mocks (and then dispatches in a hail of fairly explicit gunfire).
Middle-aged, divorced office drone Frank (Joel Murray, brother of Bill and known for his work on Mad Men and Shameless) cannot tolerate any more of the braying contestants on an American Idol-style competition or the privileged brats on another channel demanding the world for their “Sweet 16.” He harbors desires to see them all wiped from the earth while impotently watching television or recoiling from his co-workers constant chatter about Lindsay Lohan or Brad Pitt’s personal lives. Murray’s constant deadpan voice-over lets us into Frank’s bitter commentary (not unlike Jack’s mocking narration in Fight Club). After Frank is diagnosed with a terminal illness, his suicidal despair leads to the actual murder of one of those loathed reality stars and her family. His “Tyler Durden” urging him to go further is an equally fed-up adolescent girl called Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr stealing the show with more than a little of Christina Ricci’s old bite). An abnormal but sweet bond formed, the two head out on a killing spree – targeting only the rudest amongst us – whether it be the guy taking up two parking spaces or a bunch of cell-phone drones in a movie theater, Goldthwait aims for small potato targets but the point is made that we are a culture in self-obsessed decline.
The first two-thirds of God Bless America offer an inverse of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers – there are no pompous discourses on Frank and Roxy’s psychological motivations or Native American spirit guides to give the slaughter a higher purpose. Goldthwait’s frustration with his broadly-drawn cultural villains is relatable and has the same momentary impact as a stand-up routine. While the content is to be expected from a man whose leftist, conversational stage persona helped foster the current underground comedy boom, Goldthwait’s sensitive, professional direction does much to convey his serious intentions rather than playing as a sketchy series of bad taste riffs a la John Waters.
Joel Murray and Tara Lynne Barr in “God Bless America.” © 2011 – Magnolia Pictures.
I was put off slightly by the unapologetic fetishizing of guns as a solution to real human issues because there are too many nut jobs out there with less satirical intentions, but what is most problematic about God Bless America is its narrow-vision endgame on the karaoke competition stage standing in as a nexus of all that is wrong with 21st century America. For one, the theater in the film is far too small to convey the show’s dominance as an American tastemaker. Mostly though, the last act reduces the acerbic Frank to a mouthpiece for an on-the-nose message spelled out in a flatly sincere monologue which the frenzy of the earlier scenes make plain with a confrontational voice more suited to the comedic nature of Goldthwait’s loud, abrasive talents.
Gregory Fichter
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