I threw instinct and caution to the wind because I had a free screening of Tape, but also because I'd read a few good reviews of it that said Ethan Hawke actually acts in it for the first time in his career. This I had to see to believe. Well, he does "act" in the sense that, instead of being sullen and vacant, he's hyper and grating. He's gone from being passive-aggressively annoying to being aggressive-aggressively annoying. He bounces around the shabby motel room in which the entire film is set so frantically that you want to shake him by the throat until he passes out... or, at least, I did.
Just a warning that I'm going to give plot details here, because the plot enraged me so much that I have to spew venom about it in specific ways. I said before that I'd read a couple good reviews of it; well, the day of the movie, I found some more reviews, most of which were negative, and some of which revealed the central plot point, which involves a date rape. Now, my first reaction was that I should avoid this movie because men can't possibly understand what rape feels like, and therefore any attempt (particularly by someone as self-assured yet painfully uninsightful as Linklater) is likely to piss me off. Then I thought, I'm being narrow-minded; men should be discussing rape. After seeing the movie, however, I am back to my original stance, because this movie, written and directed by men, sets back rape awareness by about 20 years, back to the days of "when a woman says 'no,' she really means 'yes'" and "if she struggles, that just means she likes it rough."
Ethan Hawke is a ne'er-do-well who's come to Lansing, MI, to see his best friend from high school's film, debuting at the Lansing Film Festival. His friend, Robert Sean Leonard, comes to pick him up for dinner at his motel room, and the two start talking about old times and about Hawke's general loserness (loserability?). At this point, Leonard is seeming fairly likable, disgusted by his friend's drug-dealing lifestyle and lack of respect for women. But then Hawke pressures Leonard to admit that, back in high school, he raped Hawke's ex-girlfriend (Uma Thurman). Finally Leonard admits it, but while trivializing it and passing it off as "something that got out of hand." Suddenly there's no sympathetic character in this cramped motel room -- you're stuck with two increasingly unpleasant, immature pricks who will not shut up (that could actually describe just about every Linklater movie).
Hawke tries to pass off his coercing Leonard to confess (and surreptitiously taping said confession) as his wanting to give closure to Thurman, but when she appears at the room, it becomes plain that he has no interest in what she wants; his only goal is to humiliate and torture Leonard. He's set it up so that Thurman and Leonard, who haven't seen each other since the night of the alleged rape, are thrust together without their knowledge or consent, and when Thurman, clearly uncomfortable, wants to leave, he forces her to stay and needles her into a discussion of the rape. Way to defend her honor, Ethan. It's sickening to watch, and the only redemption is Thurman's character, who starts off as a meek, pliable victim of Hawke's scheme and ends up taking control of the situation, turning the tables on both men (Thurman gives by far the best performance of the trio). But in a sense, she makes the political ramifications even worse, because she insists that the "incident" was consensual... yet we've heard Leonard admit that "I pinned her arms behind her and stuck my dick into her." Oh yeah -- that sounds like mutual consent to me. Though I don't think this is ultimately what playwright Stephen Belber intended -- I think he meant Thurman's character to suggest that she let Leonard have sex with her because she had a crush on him, although this doesn't explain why he had his hand over her mouth -- it comes across as "consensual sex is when a girl has a crush on a guy, even if she's a virgin and wouldn't sleep with her boyfriend and didn't suggest that she wanted to have sex; or when she struggles but not hard enough to actually stop the guy."
It's hard to understand why Thurman and Leonard put with Hawke's manipulative, sadistic, self-centered prick of a character. He doesn't seem to have a particularly strong or magnetic personality, and he certainly doesn't offer any rewards to compensate for his unpleasant behavior. It seems like the only reason that neither Thurman nor Leonard just say, "Fuck you," and walk out the door is that then there would be no movie.
Beyond its repellent treatment of the sensitive subject matter, the movie is claustrophobic and static. It's the kind of self-indulgent drama-class exercise that actors and solipsistic writers seem to think audiences should love, a verbose roundelay of emotional baggage being packed, unpacked, and repacked. These things can work under very specific circumstances, none of which are met by creating two such despicable characters, filming on digital video that makes the movie look like shit, stretching every conversation well past its natural end, dragging the film more than an hour over the length the material can sustain, and casting Ethan Hawke. True, there are some clever lines here and there, and I laughed several times, but not enough to clear the bad taste from my mouth.
I think this movie should end once and for all the notion that Linklater is any kind of filmmaker. I'm willing to accept that deathly dull artistes like Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog are geniuses, and that I'm just too shallow or too enamored of things like "action," "interesting dialogue," or "plots that make sense" to get them. But nothing anyone can say will convince me that Linklater has any fucking clue about how to make a movie. As I was watching Tape, I kept wondering why this was being released in a theater. Setting aside how completely unnecessary it is (after all, far more unnecessary -- and offensive -- movies get released all the time), it's done so amateurishly that, if you handed me a rented camcorder and a $30 motel room, I could have done a better job. The digital video, which worked to good effect in movies like The Celebration, just makes the movie look even cheaper than it probably was, and Linklater employs an exceptionally obnoxious filming style, the most nauseating (literally) hallmark of which is zooming the camera between two people speaking from opposite ends of the room, like you're watching a tennis match with a rocket-powered ball. It made both me and John so dizzy that we had to close our eyes.
And yet I didn't walk out. Go figure.
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