To a whole generation of movie fans, Bobcat Goldthwait will forever be crazy Officer Zed from the Police Academy films, but a quick look at his recent CV reveals the emergence of a talented writer and director with a penchant for sophisticated black comedy. God Bless America is Goldthwait’s latest satirical attempt to mine comedy gold from a taboo subject, focussing as it does on a pair of spree-killers, and their dark, violent but also very funny journey across America.
Joel Murray (brother of Bill) plays Frank, a man left suicidal by the disintegration of his personal and professional life. In fact, the only thing that stops Frank from putting a bullet in his brain is the realisation that if there’s one thing he hates more than himself, it’s the toxic stream of modern American culture spewing forth from his TV set every night during his migraine-induced bouts of insomnia. Coming to the conclusion that he has nothing to lose, Frank finds a new purpose in life as a self-styled executioner of “those people who deserve to die”, which to his mind means the DJs, TV personalities, politicians and just plain rude people who represent the end product of a culture which venerates cruelty and hollow sentiment. To this end, he embarks on a killing spree with his new friend Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), a precocious teenager whose wanton blood-lust at times disturbs even Frank. Abandoning all sense of conventional morality, this platonic Bonny and Clyde hit the road and bring swift, bloody justice to the idols of modern America.
Goldthwait has described this film as “a very violent movie about kindness”, and it’s a description that almost seems to fit. It certainly echoes Frank’s repeated demands to know why people can’t just be nice to each other; an ironic question from a man who spends much of the movie gunning down his fellow human beings. Much of the film’s violence is shocking, and this is of course deliberate; there would be no point in asking difficult and disturbing questions about American (and by extension, Western) media and culture while simultaneously sanitising what is, in many ways, a brutal film. Like all well-made black comedies, though, God Bless America‘s most disturbing feature is its ability to make you laugh amidst all the carnage, for as well as being a brutal film, it’s also a very funny one. Such a jarring juxtaposition will indeed make it a tough watch for some viewers, but it’s a credit to Goldthwait’s writing and directing that he can balance such disparate elements so elegantly. The only sequences which are narratively problematic are the scenes which feature Frank’s extended rants about the state of the nation. It’s clear that in these mini-monologues, Goldthwait is essentially using the character as a mouthpiece to vent his rage and frustration about the impact that modern culture has on our basic humanity, and it does feel like they break the flow of the film somewhat. That said, his criticisms of society and modern living are so well-observed that it’s difficult not to find yourself nodding along in agreement with Frank as he rages, if not so much when he starts shooting people.
The most interesting aspect of the film, though – and one seemingly ignored in most reviews – is the question it raises about sanity. In an argument about gun control following one of their more protracted murders, Roxy takes Frank to task for his libertarian sympathies. If you relax the law, she says, then “any nut will be able to get a gun”. It’s a line that seems intended to provoke little more than a knowing smirk, but it also makes explicit a question which has been hinted at from the earliest scenes of the film: are Frank and Roxy insane? Surely, any person who goes around killing people because they believe them to be spreading malign influence through the media is to be considered psychotic, and yet Goldthwait is at pains to show us the apparent rationality in the behaviour of his characters. The superb central performances from Murray and Barr succeed in turning Frank and Roxy into probably the two most endearing spree-killers in the history of cinema, and the tenderness of their ever-so-slightly romantic relationship shows that, despite their destructive rage, they never completely lose touch with their humanity. Is the lack of empathy in their killings enough to condemn them as psychopaths, or is it the only really rational response to a world so twisted and warped by casual cruelty and emotional detachment that simple acts of kindness, as Frank laments, are a thing of the past? It’s a provocative question, and one which has no easy answers, but it’s the sort of question that Bobcat Goldthwait likes to ask. And that’s why he should make many more films.
Jim Taylor, geekzine correspondent, reporting from the last days of the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012.
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