SubVerse

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT
Writer/Director: Eric Eason
Film website: Journey to the End of the Night
Viewed at: 2006 Tribeca Film Fest

To start with the worst first – let’s call it a gauge, before I start waxing rhapsodically about the films at this year’s Tribeca Fest I loved – Eric Eason’s Brazil-set thriller was so bad, I literally had to walk out of the theater in physical pain.

The first few minutes of the film, I was actually pretty entranced by. The setting was exciting – seedy Sao Paulo at night. The photography was super-interesting, using both muted colors and film bleached to high-contrast. And it starred Mos Def doing a spot-on Nigerian accent as a migrant dishwasher caught up in a dangerous game of drugs and money.

But, by less than a quarter of the way in, it was clear the filmmaker had no idea what he was doing and was wasting my time. And I was ready to walk out.

The hard part was, it was the film’s cast & crew premiere – so all the stars were there, and the producers and the executives and their families, all filling the Reserved section in the middle of the theater. And I was sitting in the middle of the second row.

I held out for as long as I could, out of sheer embarrassment. Until it got to the point I actually wanted to go punch the filmmaker in the face for wasting an hour of my life and pushing me ever closer to my death.

So I noisily gathered my coat and my umbrella and my bag and my hat and squeezed my way out of the aisle. Of course, I then went for the wrong exit on the side, so the usher had to shine his flashlight across the theater for me – and spotlighted me as I crossed right in front of the actors and the producers and the executives and the filmmaker. What could I do? At least, I assured myself, if most of them were seeing the film for the first time, they were wishing they could walk out too.

The truth is, the film was really two-films-in-one. Mos Def starred in the first, and his acting was beautifully subtle, nuanced and smart. The guy’s amazing. And his scene as the dishwasher trying to pretend he knows what he’s doing with a group of dangerous African drug dealers, was unexpectedly scary and funny.

But the rest of the time we had to watch Brendan Fraser and Scott Glenn in an abysmally written and over-acted father/son drama that had absolutely no emotional or psychological truth to it. Catalina Sandino Moreno, the girl from Maria Full of Grace was there to stand around and look sad, as father and son fought over her. But I never believed any of them could ever fall in love, and with a plot line that evinced no understanding of humans or reality, lots of over-the-top emotional outbursts, and not a beat of forward movement in the story – you can understand why my fingernails were scratching into the armrest.

Eason had a small indie hit with a film called Manito four years ago. I didn’t see it, but here’s what I suspect happened. He probably spent years working on that script for his first film, and when it made him a name, people with money started coming to him and asking him what he wanted to do next. Problem was, he didn’t have anything else he’d written. So he had to write this next thing in a week, and get into production while the money was there and the stars were interested – and he never got to advance past a first draft.

It’s the same theory I have for why the two Matrix sequels were so bad.

What’s so scary, though, is that nobody involved in the project had the balls or the foresight to offer their editing services to him. If Manito was really as good as people said, then the fact that his second film is so shockingly bad, may say more about the way films are made and supported, than about this poor schnook’s failure as an artist.