A callow writer attempts to use a young woman’s death as a springboard to fame in Vengeance, the filmmaking debut of actor/writer B.J. Novak. Playing the lead role, Novak personifies onscreen some of the smugness and opportunism often found when the media turns its attention to rural America. But the film isn’t entirely free of the character’s flaws; moments of insight or empathy struggle for notice above the script’s false notes and unconvincing observations. Mild fish-out-of-water humor and an element of mystery may satisfy fans of Novak’s work on the again-popular The Office, but fall short of proving he has much potential as a big-screen auteur.
Novak’s Ben Manalowitz is a Brooklyn writer who, not content to have a job at The New Yorker, wants to sell a story to a hot podcasting company run by Issa Rae’s Eloise. But his cocktail-party pitches have a grasping-for-profundity quality you’d think his day job would’ve cured. He doesn’t know what turns a notion into a publishable story, maybe because he’s an entitled phony who invests less energy in writing than in pursuing women whose last names he never bothers to learn.
Vengeance
The Bottom Line
A thinly amusing culture-clash.
One of those anonymous hookups leads to what might be his big break. A Texas girl named Abilene Shaw (Lio Tipton, seen in brief flashbacks) slept with Ben a couple of times while in NYC, and talked about him enough back home that her family believed they were a couple. When she dies, her heartbroken brother Ty (Boyd Holbrook) calls Ben to break the news. The conversation gets awkward enough that Ben agrees to fly down for the funeral. (Really?)
In an unnamed oilfield town in remote West Texas, Ben learns that Ty is sure his sister’s fatal overdose was murder. “She never touched so much as an Advil,” we hear several times, and that certainty is enough to set Ty on a mission to identify and kill the person who did it. He assumes Ben will want to join in, but Ben sees this misguided vendetta as podcast fodder. This is, after all, a Dead White Girl. Eloise agrees, and the town soon adjusts to seeing an outsider walking around with a digital recorder in his hand.
The Shaws and their neighbors are broadly drawn, the screenplay leaning predictably into cliches about gun owners. Novak stops short of fully mocking them (Texans buy movie tickets too!); but the opportunities he takes to make them look savvier than Ben expects can be contrived (a long gag about football allegiances, for instance) or worse.
One character whose intelligence the film respects is Quentin Sellers (Ashton Kutcher), a music producer who inspires his hopeful songwriters with chin-scratching talk about the nature of the universe as it pertains to recording. Sellers is no more credible a character than the others (Jimmie Dale Gilmore would make a better model for a genuine West Texas musical philosopher), but Kutcher makes him oddly engaging, and it’s through his monologues that Novak attempts to explain the seeming insanity of non-cosmopolitan America.
The movie bounces back and forth between presenting Abilene’s death as a mystery to solve and a sad open-and-shut case. Eloise is happy either way, responding with puzzling enthusiasm to the half-baked audio files Ben sends her. Inevitably, our hero finds some affection for his hosts along the way, especially Abilene’s sweet kid brother Mason (Eli Abrams Bickel), who is identified in the credits only by his insulting nickname.
But he’s still not seeing things clearly, and won’t until the movie starts to make good on its Wild West title. Whether viewers believe anything that happens in the last ten minutes or not, Vengeance ties things up neatly, eschewing the open-endedness a hit podcast might embrace. What good is a trip into the heartland if you can’t come back to New York believing you understand everything?