Rage (2010) - 2/4

I have killed a man for wounding me,

A young man for hurting me.

If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold,

Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold. (Gen 4:23-24)

And the insane biker in Rage shall be avenged seven-hundred-seventy-sevenfold, as one offense sends him on a spree of murder and rape of anyone the protagonist, Dennis Twist, knows, has spoken to, has shared breathing space with, or has seen on TV. I exaggerate, but the explanation for the violence is quite tenuous. We all have violent fantasies, most of which are probably disproportionate to the offense that occasioned them. Most of us are very talented at keeping fantasy as fantasy. This film is about a guy who clearly cannot do that. After Dennis (Rick Crawford), a douchebag husband, leaves his sweet wife (Audrey Walker) for a day in town, he meets his mistress and breaks it off in a flurry of exquisitely bad dialogue like, "Were you loving your wife all those times your dick was in me?" He's then pursued by a biker obsessed with making his life miserable, culminating in, as I say, murders and rapes.

You know who else couldn't control their rage? The Great Lord Zeus, King of the Gods. I'm not being glib. Or I am, but only slightly. You see, the filmmaker Christopher Witherspoon, who also plays the biker and has a cameo as The Guy in the Garage Talking about Spielberg's Duel, purposely makes allusions to the biker as a force of fate, not unlike in Greek tragedy. In fact, the Guy in the Garage Talking about Spielberg's Duel even brings up the idea that the truck in Duel is a force of nature. I think Duel is about masculinity, actually, but that's beside the point. The point is that the biker can be seen as a force of pure karma whose personal motivations are scarcely relevant. Dennis's misdeeds, conscious or unconscious, are being revisited upon him many-fold through the person of the biker, and Dennis's guilt allows it to continue. Indeed, were anyone genuinely pursued by karma, our collective misdeeds could seriously fuck us up. Seriously.

When this force of karma is visited upon characters who really have no connection with Dennis's misdeeds, however, the plot is a little lost. Perhaps the anxiety of wanting to make an exciting film had Witherspoon inserting unnecessary violence, or contriving distractions for the biker in order to spare Dennis. I wish he had stuck to his thematic guns and just punished the hell out of Dennis. The character is kind of a douche, though he is trying to do the right thing and return to his wife. However, even when his wife's life may be in danger, he continues trying to hide his affair from her. When she's being assaulted, he cowers in a corner and whines. Dennis continues to whine long beyond the time for whining. So he's not just a douche, he's a pussy too. If anyone deserves enormous on-screen punishment, it's ol' Dennis Twist. Not his wife and not the beer-bellied neighbour. In fact, there is little to no reason provided in the film for harming these people.

I don't think it was wise of Witherspoon to bring up Duel in the midst of Rage, as Rage does not compare favourably. Spielberg's direction of the on-road action is excellent, keeping the momentum of what could so easily be a repetitive and dull film ever increasing until the climax. Moreover, Spielberg had a screenplay by one of the greatest writers of genre screenplays in cinematic history, Richard Matheson, ensuring not an extraneous or weak line of dialogue. Rage does not keep up much momentum, perhaps because there's too much distraction in the city setting chosen. Pausing the chase to discuss fate and the meaning of life with one's therapist doesn't help the pace, nor does bringing one's car in to the garage, chatting with the mechanic, and overhearing a discussion about Spielberg's films. The decision to take the violence off the road for the climactic scenes also serves to divide the action, making it discontinuous and the pace choppy.

Perhaps Rage would have worked best not presenting itself as a road-terror movie, or even staying mostly off-road. Because as a cat-and-mouse road-terror movie, Rage just doesn't hold up to other contenders. Duel, Joy Ride (2001), Hush (2009), and the opening of Jeepers Creepers (2007) are all better at it. This is a major problem in Witherspoon's writing and structuring of the film. Where the film's prime pleasure should be in the cat-and-mouse game, the road games, it really is in the periphery. The cat-and-mouse game is frequently uninteresting or, when interesting, like a bad lover it climaxes too soon. I found myself distracted by the mystery of who is behind the helmet, a mystery that never even threatens our attention in Duel and is already revealed before the action of Joy Ride.

Still, Rage is clearly its own movie with its own themes and internal logic. I enjoyed a good many of the finer touches, dark humour like closing a shower curtain before murdering the victim inside. The sleek, shiny textures of the biker's accoutrement as rendered on digital video are also very enjoyable in a purely sensuous way. And overall, the film does comment on a real truth of this world: there's a lot of rage out there as it is, so we should all try to be a little considerate to others. While a bumpy ride, so to speak, Rage is an interesting film that follows its premises to the end. I hope to see more from Witherspoon, preferably not tying himself to an influence next time.