Nobel Son

"Uh-oh," I muttered to myself, at the laptop in the kitchen. "Bomb alert!"

I was staring at the web page for the movie listings for that afternoon, and the ones for tomorrow after the schedule change. Nobel Son had come out only last week and was playing in eight theaters around Boston. The next day it would be down to only one---in Cambridge. Cambridge was for obscure art movies, dammit, not for chasing down multiplex rejects.

A half hour later I was on the road in the driving cold rain on I495 headed up to Lowell to catch the 2:15 showing. The kid at the ticket counter: "You're lucky. This is the last day."

"You saw it?" I asked. He did. Sort of hemmed and hawed. Told me to come tell him what I thought of it on the way out. Friendly staff in Lowell, but they should be, since it's a really nice multiplex, where I don't mind waiting before the show and reading at the little round cafe tables in the lobby.

I was one of two patrons by the time the show started. Somehow I didn't figure it could be as bad as it seemed. The theme was appealing: a Nobel-prize winning chemist played by Alan Rickman has his son kidnapped. Rickman's character is a real grade A asshole and his son winds up siding with the kidnapper. Then complications set in. Having worked alongside a few Nobel scientists way back when, ones who had colossal egos, I figured I could find a way to enjoy this. For a while I did. It seems fun to root against Rickman's character, and to wait for his inevitable comeuppance as the complicated plot unfolds. Where does Eliza Dushku's repulsively (un)erotic character fit in to the puzzle we are seeing?

One of the things that distinguishes postmodern storytelling from the classical is the large-scale destruction of the concept of justice, which has come to be replaced in postmodern films by simple vengeance. Justice requires faith in the rule of law, which has largely been abandoned. Crime does pay, we now know. You just have to be the right kind of criminal. Since all characters tend towards dishonor in the postmodern, we wind up simply rooting for the least despicable characters to triumph.

That pretty much is how I took in Nobel Son. Even despite all that, it could have been a decent story but it just goes all kablooey towards the end, having bitten off more than it could chew with too much plot. There was too much to wrap up, and the movie was not capable of it. So instead it just bailed. In my opinion, that's exactly why classical structure works, by the way: storywise, it will pull your ass out of the fire and tend to make for good interesting resolutions of suspense plots.

On the way out, I thought about why it had tanked so hard at the box office. The movie is well cast, and well acted, but I could sense it just wasn't what America was looking for right now. Certainly the high-brow subject matter of the movie---academic science---didn't help its cause.

I stopped at the front counter and saw my friend. "It didn't know what it wanted to be," he said, offering his opinion in depth. "It tried to be a teen angst movie, and a kidnapping movie at the same time." Well put, my man.

On the way home I thought about how Rickman complains that everyone thinks he only plays heavies. This movie will do nothing to help his cause. Then it hit me: the whole damn thing should have been a comedy!