This Weekend’s Movies: “He Was a Quiet Man”

I’m going to give He Was a Quiet Man the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s a dark comedy, and as a dark comedy it’s not bad. Oh, wait, nope we’re supposed to take it seriously. Okay, it’s back to sucking.

He Was a Quiet Man is an entry in that small, but notable genre “the angry white male” movie. Other entries in this genre include Falling Down, Fight Club, American Beauty, and, oh I dunno, Death Wish. It’s a movie that simmers with rage at the way average American men are trapped by the culture in humiliating jobs and surrounded by emasculating female co-workers who…

Okay, I can’t even complete the thought because the movie is so freaking stupid! No, seriously, it’s mind-bogglingly inept. In the movie, Christian “what the hell happened to my career?” Slater plays Bob Maconel, a schlub who works at a life-draining job, has a dorky haircut, wears dorky clothes, is routinely humiliated by his bosses and the attractive women in his office. This is a guy who makes Milton Waddams of Office Space look like Gordon freaking Gekko. He’s pathetically fixated on his gyrating statuette of a hula dancer and at home, in his shabby house, is mercilessly mocked by his goldfish. Yes, you read that right.

Bob is shown to be a time-bomb, loading a gun in his cubicle and picking out his targets, fantasizing about blowing up his workplace. Well, who hasn’t been there? Anyway, before he can start his killing spree another coworker snaps first and shoots up the joint. Bob kills him before he can finish the job, but not before he shoots and paralyzes Vanessa, a pretty VP Bob has an unrequited crush on.

Suddenly Bob is a hero, embraced by the people that previously mocked or ignored him, given a window office and a company car. But Vanessa, now a quadriplegic, hates him for not letting her die. She mellows, though, and soon asks Bob to help her die. Bob tries his best, but can’t go through with it. Eventually they fall in love (sure, why not), and Bob becomes energized and rehabilitated. He starts wearing suits and the goldfish stop trash-talking him. But just as things seem to be working out for Bob, it all comes apart when…er, I’m not sure. I think it’s all supposed to be a dream. Bob is actually about to shoot up the place, but the fantasy stops him and he shoots himself instead. I’m sorry, did I spoil that for you? Well, there are two other endings writer/director Frank A. Cappello shot that you can watch instead. Cappello admits that he had no idea how to end the movie, and on the basis of the one he used, he never figured it out.

There are some good ideas in HWAQM, but they need a better filmmaker to do anything compelling with them. As a writer, Cappello doesn’t seem to understand the story he’s telling, and as a director he doesn’t know how to shoot it. The movie’s tone snaps so wildly between pervasive dread and satiric comedy, you can’t help but wonder if Cappello didn’t set out to make an unholy hybrid of Taxi Driver and Office Space. The scenes in Bob’s office are so broad they border on camp. A couple of bullying suits come off like doppelgangers of the dweeby white guys that bookend Harold and Kumar Go to the White Castle (“Let’s get our drinkee-drinkee on!”). William H. Macy (yes, that William H. Macy) plays his role of Company president like he’s in one of the Coen brothers’s screwball comedies. And then we’re suddenly in the hell of Bob’s tormented psyche and the gathering storm of imminent violence. Maybe Cappello needs mood stabilizers.

<For his part, Christian Slater, having apparently decided that this is going to be his comeback role, acts up such a storm. He practically sweats through his dweeby short-sleeved-shirt-and-tie outfits. He’s also gone the DeNiro/Theron route of de-glamorizing himself as much as possible with a forehead the size of Montana and birth-control glasses. Alas, all it does is highlight his considerable limitations as an actor and make people of a certain age wonder what all the fuss was about back in 1989 when he was in Heathers.

Cappello does him no favors by treating Bob more like a circus geek than a human being, but then the guy’s screwed up everything else in this movie, why not the treatment of his leading man? In the end I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about Bob, his co-workers, or society in general. I do know I feel about Cappello, though. He’d probably make halfway-decent barrista at Starbucks.