Small Apartments ranks up there with Roman Coppola's A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III and Quentin Dipeux's Wrong as one of the damnedest films of 2013, so far. It's not even June, and I've seen three films exercising their unalienable (?) right to be absurd, norm-challenging works of subversive art. Call it good, bad, I'll just say, none of these films I've liked to their true potential.
This is a more interesting film than the previous two, yet I employ "interesting" with caution. Considering the one built an eighty-six minute film around an uninteresting, mentally unstable graphic designer and the other around an eccentric who lost is dog and is finding the most obscure people in his neighborhood, the competition was relatively low. It concerns Franklin Franklin, played by British comedian Matt Lucas, a bald, pasty, morbidly obese hermit, residing in a seedy Californian apartment, wasting away in his tighty-whities and socks, playing his alpenhorn and drinking liter after liter of Moxie cola. All I can say is that this is one of the most enigmatic figures I've seen in film this year. I can't recall the last time it took almost a full paragraph's worth of text to describe the main character in this film. And wait till I tell you more.
Franklin loves eating his pickles with mustard on them, wandering aimlessly around his apartment with his loyal dog, and keeping several different wigs handy for the next time he goes out. He is close with his brother, currently institutionalized in a psychiatric ward, who sends him tape-recordings and toenails periodically. Franklin's neighbor is "Tommy Balls," an obnoxious goth-punk-rocker, who is attempting to formulate a better life for himself by setting goals like constructing a gravity bong. He is played by Johnny Knoxville in one of the film's only interesting performances. Other neighbors are the nosy codger Mr. Allspice (James Caan) and aspiring stripper Simone (Juno Temple).
So where is this going, you may wonder? Well, Franklin just so happened to kill his landlord because of a small little uprising and now must dispose of the body. He drives to the man's home, where he attempts to make it look like a suicide attempt by haphazardly choosing not one but several different methods of offing oneself such as incineration, a shotgun blow to the head, and a stab wound. The end result is clearly not someone who killed himself, but in order to clear this detail up, Franklin pens a vulgar suicide note. He then becomes the target of Billy Crystal's Burt Walnut, a fire detective who investigates the apartment complex and tries to pinpoint who exactly committed this despicable murder.
Trust me, reader, the plot moves a lot slower than how I described it. Much slower, which is one of the film's gravest flaws. I can forget about all the cute obscurities, the goofy and ponderous situations, and the cockamamie antics, but I can't forgive the uncompromisingly slow pace of this film. To begin with, I'm unsure of how we are supposed to "deal" with those protagonist, for the lack of a better word. Are we supposed to root for him? Do we pity him? Is he an anti-hero? Someone who kills his landlord who is completely in-line for requesting rent money doesn't seem like a solution that's easy to forgive. Do we sympathize with the fact that he's a social pariah? Are we supposed to laugh when he gets beaten up and robbed by thugs in the middle of nowhere? In order to make a black comedy, there needs to be some clarity; some direction or hint at what we're supposed to take seriously, find funny, or simply sneer at. Small Apartments is so juvenile, grotesque, and often bleak that it comes off as a sad character study on several lost souls that we want to hug, not laugh at.
If the reprehensible Movie 43 combined almost every mainstream, A-lister Hollywood could offer at that point in time, Small Apartments should go down as the Movie 43 of independent films, featuring a large cast of charming screen actors in less-than-charming material. Matt Lucas, who is predominately famous for Little Britain, does fine work playing a character we're rather unsure of, Johnny Knoxville, as stated, is pretty good, Juno Temple is welcomed, Rebel Wilson, in her concise role, isn't too bad, Billy Crystal is a nice addition, James Caan is cool, and DJ Qualls is good, albeit shortchanged and woefully underused. Yet what soils most of their appearances is the fact that they are subjected to obsessively quirky material and uninteresting banter that substitutes plot progression.
Director Jonas Åkerlund, who worked for several years in the music video field, likely relished the thought of having an ample amount of time to construct a story from the ground up, and thus, Small Apartments features a design similar to that of a skit or music video. It also features enough quirkiness and eccentricities to put someone like Wes Anderson to shame. This is a bizarre effort, indeed. I laughed on occasion, grew restless frequently, and overall, will regard the experience with mounting confusion and perplexing emotions.
Starring: Matt Lucas, Billy Crystal, James Caan, Johnny Knoxville, Juno Temple, and Rebel Wilson. Directed by: Jonas Åkerlund.
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