The Death of Dick Long. Directed by Daniel Scheinert. Starring Michael Abbott Jr, Virginia Newcomb, Andre Hyland and Sarah Baker. Rating: 6 (out of 10). Canadian premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
First, there’s the title. Then there’s the fact that director Daniel Scheinert was one of the co-directors of 2016’s bizarro Swiss Army Man, in which Paul Dano hung out with a flatulent and very dead Daniel Radcliffe.
Viewers should expect weird and wicked from The Death of Dick Long.
The director himself plays Dick Long, whose offer of “Y’all wanna get weird?” starts the disastrous chain of events. The night starts with Dick, Zeke and Earl (Michael Abbott Jr, Andre Hyland) banging tunes out, badly, in Zeke’s garage; it progresses predictably from shot-gunned beers and lots of weed, to fireworks and target practice with rifles and handguns. The night ends with Zeke and Earl depositing Dick’s bleeding body in front of the emergency room doors and running away.
Over the next hour we’ll be given clues as to what happened to Dick, an hour populated by some smart comedy at the expense of rural Alabama, Scheinert’s home state. Earl and Zeke are so hapless and incompetent that we feel sorry for them; it’s like Fargo, but without the woodchipper. Officer Dudley (Sarah Baker), however, doesn’t quite have the dogged determination of Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson: her plan to catch the criminals consists of “the best we can hope for is something falls into our laps.”
Not that the two men don’t draw plenty of attention to themselves: Earl intends to skip town but never does, driving around with all of his belongings – including an oversized cheetah painting – in his pickup truck. And in between dropping his daughter to school and doing a terrible job of destroying evidence, Zeke can’t keep his story straight with his wife (an excellent Virginia Newcomb).
The only person with a lick of sense in the story is their daughter (Poppy Cunningham) who asks all the right questions and spots the grown-ups’ inconsistencies a mile away. She’d have the case closed by days’ end.
But that’s the first hour. An early clue points to the work of “some real perverts,” and halfway through the film we learn the truth. Now the characters are more piteous than hilarious, Abbott bringing an emotional honesty to the situation: “When you’re lonely it doesn’t always go away when you get married.”
The film, which premiered at Sundance, was written by Daniel Chew, who co-directed Swiss Army Man with Scheinert. Chew was living in Alabama at the time he wrote the screenplay and based it loosely on true events. Though the men appear to be typical rednecks – stars-and-bars flags lurking in the periphery – we know that this brand of toxic masculinity crosses socio-economic barriers and could just as easily have been set at a frat party as in a mobile home park. It’s a credit to the writing that we feel sympathy for the men, despite their actions and irreparably damaged though they may be. What the hell happened to these good ol’ boys before the S hit the fan (in Zeke’s words)?
Strong women put up with all the nonsense from the men, raise their children and feel guilty because they work all day and fail to put a home-cooked dinner on the table, blind to it all. The women anchor this film, from the senior officer who stashes Malibu and an open can of pineapple juice in the desk drawer to Jane Long (Jess Weixler), who doesn’t report Dick missing because she thinks that the worst thing that can happen is that her husband is having an affair.
The story never recovers its sense of fun — dark though it was — and the remainder of the movie drags to its depressing, inevitable conclusion. Despite the complex characters and standout performances, if the twist doesn’t put you off, then the uneven pacing will.
