Butler's Cinema Scene

Joel Murray and Tara Lynne Barr…a modern Bonnie & Clyde?

“GOD BLESS AMERICA”  My rating: B- (Opening May 11 at the Screenland Crossroads)

100 minutes | Audience rating: R

“God Bless America” is less a movie than a primal scream of rage and frustration.

It’s basically a riff on the lovers-on-a-murder-spree genre (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “Badlands,” even “Thelma & Louise”), but one packed to the gills with biting social commentary courtesy of writer/director  Bobcat Goldthwait.

In case you didn’t know, Goldthwait, best known for his synapse-knotting stand-up comedy delivery, is a pretty decent filmmaker (“Shakes the Clown,” “World’s Greatest Dad”)

Here he takes all the things that infuriate him about America’s shallow, anti-intellectual, Kardashian-worshipping popular culture and unmercifully skewers them and their proponents.

Our anti-hero is sad sack Frank (Joel Murray), a 40-something schlemiel ignored by his ex and their young daughter and apparently invisible to just about everyone else.

Frank shares a duplex with a slovenly young couple and their air-raid siren of a screaming infant. At work he’s appalled by co-workers whose existences revolve around last night’s reality-TV programming.

When he receives a double whammy of bad news – he’s being fired and has been diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor – Frank decides he’s tired of being the world’s punching bag. He steals his Neanderthal neighbor’s hot yellow sports car and goes looking for a way to express his disgust with the modern world.

He decides that a good start would be  assassinating a teenager named Chloe (Maddie Hasson) who is the star of her own wildly popular reality show in which she and her girl gang make life miserable for anyone who’s not as cute, rich and white as they are.

Frank is soon joined by one of Chloe’s classmates, Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), an adolescent nihilist fed up with the rampant hypocrisy of modern life. Theirs isn’t a sexual relationship (they are Platonic spree killers; Frank would rather be known as a mass murderer than a pedophile). It’s more of a father/daughter thing.

That is, if fathers taught their daughters to handle firearms and kill people.

“God Bless America” is incredibly dark and violent, and from the above description you might conclude that it’s pretty rough going.

Actually it’s funny as hell, precisely because Frank and Roxy articulate the stuff a lot of us are thinking but are too civilized to say, much less act upon.

When Frank compliments his young accomplice on her shooting skills, she responds: “ I was pretending the targets were the cast of ‘Glee’.”

Frank and Roxy make a list of people they will target:

People who pound energy drinks all day.

Any jock.

People who talk about punk rock.

Twi-hards.

People who use the terms “edgy,” “in your face” or “extreme.”

People who give high fives.

Roxy has a particular grudge against Diablo Cody, screenwriter of “Juno”: “She’s the only stripper who suffers from too much self esteem.”

When their movie-going experience is ruined by a handful of teen jackasses with cell phones, Frank and Roxy simply blow away the malefactors.

They gun down a hatred-spewing right-wing radio talk show host in New York’s Central Park.

Frank explains that he’s taking this action not because of politics, but because the talk show host is so incredibly mean. In fact, Frank says, he agrees with the blowhard on certain issues.

Which ones? the wounded-but-defiant Murdoch-head asks.

“Well…gun control.”

Then it’s on to Los Angeles and a visit to an “American Idol”-type singing competition where the beautiful, snotty judges make fun of the inept contestants.

Goldthwait can’t write himself out of the bloody corner into which he paints his two avenging angels, but  getting there is good dirty fun.

Murray — in the first season of TV’s “Mad Men” he played old-school ad man Fred Rumsen, who drank himself out of a job with the firm (no small achievement) – actually finds a degree of nobility beneath Frank’s homicidal behavior.

And his final protest to a nationwide television audience – “We no longer have any common sense of decency. No sense of shame. There is no right and wrong. The worst qualities in people are looked up to and celebrated.” – is surprisingly moving.

By comparison, Barr’s Roxy is all too eager to pick up a gun and start shooting. She’s not old enough to understand how low we’ve all sunk. She only knows she’s pissed off and wants to strike back.

Lots of people are going to hate this film for its melding of the humorous and the homicidal. Well, they shouldn’t go see it, should they?

| Robert W. Butler