Nothing Could Be Less Fine

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The New York Sun

It’s getting harder to dismiss Crispin Glover’s self-produced forays into midnight movie madness as singular eccentricities. With “It Is Fine. Everything Is Fine!,” which opens today at the IFC Center, the actor-director has delivered the promised second installment in a trilogy inaugurated by the aptly named 2005 oddity “What Is It?” But if “It Is Fine” is more straightforward and (slightly) less off-putting than its predecessor, Mr. Glover’s artistic goals remain somewhat murky and, ironically, rather constrained.

The story of “It Is Fine” is, in conception, a conventional melodrama: An outcast finds a woman who loves him for who he is. Cerebral palsy sufferer Steven C. Stewart, who also wrote the screenplay (and appeared in “What Is It?”), plays Paul, the wheelchair-bound leading man. Margit Carstensen, a German veteran of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s raw 1970s films, is Linda, a divorcée intrigued by her persistent suitor. Her teenage daughter, Karma (Carrie Szlasa), also approves of him (passionately, as it turns out).

When Linda decides that she wants Paul only as a friend, the movie takes a self-defeating macabre turn into fantasy and fetish. The spurned lover strangles the object of his affection, and proceeds to lull and then attack the various attractive women who are drawn to him. His victims include a buxom model, a shy sickly girl, and frisky young Karma, who greets Paul wearing a baby-doll nightgown. The unnerving acts arise out of scenes featuring explicit nudity or sex.

Mr. Glover and his co-director, David Brothers, faithfully stage the run-ups to these events with the trappings of movie melodrama, including a vibrant palette featuring a pleasing selection of ’80s hues, ample use of music, and artificial-looking sets that sometimes lack walls. And Ms. Carstensen leads the cast through ploddingly sincere delivery and forthright declarations purged of any hint of irony; Stewart’s thick speech is treated without comment from other characters.

But despite hitting the marks of melodrama, the movie’s insistence on Paul’s murderous urges comes to feel suspect. The way the movie opens makes clear that the whole drama is, in fact, imagined by Paul: We see him helplessly tumbling to the floor at a grim institution for the disabled, and the story begins. And not just the murders, but also the approval and adoration from pretty women, are but angry fantasies.

That may be a provocative departure from the saccharine ennobling of disabled people in the movies, but Mr. Glover, who will be on hand tonight to present the film and take questions, doesn’t find a compelling way of fleshing out Paul. Intent on making a point of Paul’s living out a fantasy, Mr. Glover forgets that the trick leaves the character one-dimensional, and the movie’s unreality feels like a hollow and belabored exercise. (Oddly, the movie’s framing device, which shows Paul in an institution, was added to Stewart’s original screenplay by Mr. Glover.)

In “What Is It?,” the elaborate production, experimental flow, and creepy cavalcade of taboo were too potent to be scorned as a mere stunt, but Mr. Glover failed to interrogate his hot-button gestures in any meaningful way. There, as in “It Is Fine,” some part of the artist seems too enamored with the instantly jarring reality of outsider weirdness to develop his material. What’s more, if Hollywood is by comparison woefully uninterested in the life experiences of the disabled, is the self-negating, overblown melodrama of “It Is Fine” really the most effective response?

“It Is Fine” doesn’t have to be considered in opposition to mainstream movies, but that’s certainly how Mr. Glover, whose most recent performance in a mainstream movie, “Beowulf,” added considerably to his coffers, likes to present his work. “It Is Fine” provides the added boilerplate that the conception of the film arose from the mind of Stewart (who died from complications from cerebral palsy in 2001, one month after principal filming wrapped), and not from the mind of Mr. Glover, who has said that naysaying critics would be kicking a dead man. As much as one wants to appreciate Mr. Glover’s quixotic efforts, the squirmy defensiveness in a statement like that, and the limitations to a movie such as “It Is Fine,” are still enough to prevent one from committing wholeheartedly to his vision.

Through November 27 (323 Sixth Ave. at West 3rd Street, 212-924-7771). Mr. Glover will appear for a presentation of his “Big Slide Show,” plus a discussion of the film after the screenings and a book signing.


The New York Sun

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