The Rover
(Australia, 103 min.)
Dir. David Michôd, Writ. David Michôd, Story by Joel
Edgerton and David Michôd
Starring: Guy Pearce, Robert Pattinson, Scoot McNairy,
Tawanda Manyimo, David Field
Chalk up The Rover under
the list of 2014’s disappointments. This sophomore feature by Animal Kingdom’s David Michôd is as
technically accomplished as his debut feature is, but audiences looking for another
helping of exhilarating Australian cinema are in for a letdown. The Rover looks and feels great n its
creation of a present-day dystopia, yet the unrelenting bleakness and
pensiveness of Michôd’s vision has little payoff. More dull than
thought-provoking and more a musing than a meditation, The Rover is a tragically empty wanderer.
The Rover carries
this prize in the car owned by Eric (Guy Pearce), who roams the desert like the
man with no name. (The frequency with which The
Rover calls attention to the leading man’s namelessness could almost be a
drinking game.) A trio of hoods steals Eric’s car after a heist goes sour and
Eric’s on the lam after his prized car. This chase might be the one genuinely
thrilling sequence in The Rover as
Michôd brings the cars together in a confrontation defined not by speed but by
strategy. A tap on the brakes is the difference between life and death, and
where other thrillers might define their hero by revving some engines, The Rover provides a heroic madman who
creates his own rules.
Michôd and Pearce make the singularity of the rover doubly
apparent when he backs down from the standoff and stealthily hunts the trio.
The turn of events leads him to a string of odd characters, including a
playfully obscure brothel granny and a dwarf who meets the bad end of a bullet.
Why the rover goes through all this trouble for one ordinary, average, and by
all accounts unremarkable car is cause for speculation.
Enter Rey (Robert Pattinson), the fourth wheel of the heist
team. Eric finds Rey stumbling in the alleys with a bullet in his gut, and he
takes ownership of him as one might a stray dog. Eric, a stuttering simpleton, was
essentially left for dead like a dog when his brother (Scoot McNairy) and
fellow crooks fled the scene, so the comparison is apt. The two men search for
Eric’s car like man and best friend: the strangeness of their relationship almost
brings the film redemption.
Pearce and Pattinson form an unlikely pair of rugged heroes.
Pearce creates an eerie antihero with his subtle madness, and his turn in The Rover is craggier and more brooding
than anything he has done before. Pattinson is the real standout here, though,
as he continues the dramatic kick that began with David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis. The Rover at first seems like prime territory for one to unleash
the same quips on Pattinson that received for the Twilight films, but his truly unexpected turn is a bizarre yet
consistently watchable feat. Rey is the direct opposite of the strong, silent
rover: he’s a snivelling, stuttering coward without much gumption. Pattinson
takes control of the performance, though, and grows Rey into a hybrid lost
boy/twisted psychopath that challenges The
Rover’s dismal bleakness. The more one finds Rey to resemble a shaggy dog,
the more one finds Pattinson’s performance quietly compelling.
Michôd gives the actors ample room to grow their characters
as The Rover’s slow and aimless plot
lets Eric and Rey drift through the grey badlands. The Rover startles with its hauntingly gritty realization of the present-day
meltdown thanks to the air of ambiguity Michôd presents with an elusive title
card that simple situates the film a decade after “the collapse.” The overall
bleakness of the barren Australian rural setting uses the natural elements of
the arid landscape, with the help of some handy make-up that makes a cast of
name actors look as if they haven’t bathed in months, to create a contemporary
wasteland that looks more unnervingly real than the apocalypse does in John
Hillcoat’s The Road.
Setting and tone aside, though, there isn’t much to The Rover. Ambiguity gives way to
thinness and the grizzled, streetwise style of the film builds with a
nihilistic force that becomes tiresome and feels empty. The light at the end of
this road is pretty dim. Even the final shred of fleeting humanity feels
disposable.
The Rover seems so
consciously vacant of morals and politics that the overall meaninglessness of the
film precipitates a kind of suicide. Even
ambivalence is hard to come by in this tedious void. One probably gets the same
thing from the film regardless of whether one sits through the whole thing or walks
out forty minutes into the running time. The
Rover just doesn't give a toot about anything.
The Rover screens in Ottawa at The ByTowne until July 24.