Thaddeus James (Shawn Hatosy) is driven under in Nobel Son.Ignoble prizewinner
By John Esther
It takes about ten viewing minutes of Nobel Son to realize the filmmaking team behind such cinematic crud as
While essentially remaining in the bubbly, bourgeois world of Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School and Bottle Shock, director/co-writer Randall Miller and producer/co-writer Jody Savin’s movie (along with familiar faces from those previous films) sees this real life husband and wife duo from Pasadena slightly moving into unfamiliarity with violent, kinetic, throbbing-music/visual esthetics when Barkley Michaelson (Bryan Greenberg), the son of Noble Prize winner, Eli Michaelson (Alan Rickman), and pathologist professor, Sarah Michaelson (Mary Steenburgen), is kidnapped and held for ransom by Eli’s illegitimate son, Thaddeus James (Shawn Hatosy), who is willing to thumb his nose (and “vice versa”) at his father as much as Barkley. Eventually the two will team up before becoming enemies once again. Patience.
Sticking to cliched binary patriarchal paradigms of evil and good, father Eli, a typically American anti-intellectual caricature of the intellectual (boorish, narcissistic, lascivious), has rationalistic reservations about saving his son while mother Sarah lets her maternal instincts emotionally erase her intellect for half the movie (to the unfunny point where she pulls a gun on the media) in order to save her son. Then there is City Hall (Eliza Dushku), the stereotypical crazy, promiscuous poetess who is also another target of the movie's anti-intellectualism; George Gastner (Danny DeVito), an obsessive compulsive neighbor; Max Mariner (Bill Pullman), the detective who has a crush on Sarah; and a slew of assembled and stolen MINI Coopers (Italian Job, anyone) adding to the hackneyed storyline.
By the time the first kidnapping concludes and a second, yet more preposterous, one commences, Nobel Son is way out of control. While being investigated by the first kidnapping, the people involved create another one. An innocent is murdered and nothing is to be done. Another MINI Cooper is stolen. Another MINI Cooper is assembled indoors. Sarah starts using her CSI skills not to help police figure out who kidnapped her son (although she can figure out what kind of people or person they are once they get the prolonged lab results of an amputated thumb), but to aid in the second kidnapping…and to suggest Barkley had something to do with both kidnappings not only defies logic, but would render him a bastard (though not an utter one like Thaddeus) -- rather than the sympathetic protagonist the Nobel Son attempts to portray -- for his participation in disfigurement and murder.
It seems the various acting talent must have noticed the shortcomings of Nobel Son at one point (perhaps the dailies?) and decided to let the audience know they, too, were aware how bad the movie really is – promotional appearances notwithstanding. DeVito, whose talent has been wasted portraying lame characters and lousy movies over the years, may be channelling Jimmy Fallon and Adam Sandler as he barely contains his laughter at his performance onscreen (or is he laughing at the others?). Rickman -- who was about the only redeeming quality in Bottle Shock, and who played a snobby elitist to comic perfection in Tim Robbins’ Bob Roberts – cannot do anything to make Eli anything other than grossly annoying. Steenburgen and
Perhaps under the direction of other directors, some of the plot points and delivery of Miller and Savin’s screenplay could have succeeded, but Miller’s direction is chunky and clunky. The more montages Miller uses the more manic and misguided movie. Quick quips are not quirky but queasy. Comic attempts are thwarted. Narrative and character conceits are layered ad nauseum. The included tunes by the Chemical Brothers -- although, perchance, a clever ode to the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and the brotherhood of Thaddeus/Barkley – are tossed into the mix without proper applicability. In other words, the more you think about Nobel Son, the more it decreases in rhyme and reason. Do the filmmakers think they can confuse audiences into enjoying Nobel Son? Well at least the men wearing wigs in Nobel Son serve a purpose rather than the unintentional distraction in Bottle Shock.
The only significant element intriguing, if not also comical, about Nobel Son is the film’s release during the awards/holiday season. Just because Bottle Shock picked up a few awards at the
