When Beauty Becomes the Beast in New York

“How very queer!” Alice’s reaction to Wonderland appropriately sums up the aftertaste of Hal Harltey’s new film, No Such Thing. Whereas the usual Hollywood fare aims for gargantuan laughs, chilling fear or blubbering tears, No Such Thing offers hard-edged dreaminess and bemused chuckles. Experienced through the fatalistic eyes of young Beatrice, played by Canadian Sarah Polley, our world is scarily believable as a topsy-turvy purgatory.

Like earlier fables, this modern-day story stars a monster (Robert John Burke). Bored with evolution and disgusted with society, the monster has retreated to an abandoned Navy bunker on the northern coast of Iceland, where he spends his eternity drinking, skulking and occasionally eating a nearby villager. The film opens with a close-up of his ranting face, setting the tone of the whole story—erratic, rambling and poignant in spite of incoherence. Both the monster and the movie speak with the same intensity and the occasional wisdom of a lonely bum in a bus terminal.

Our hero, Beatrice, is a cub reporter at a major New York daily. An orphan with no one in the world except her fiancé, she goes looking for him after he disappears on assignment in Iceland. Her search for him leads to a series of bizarre but plausible misadventures, culminating in an excruciating spine operation in a Reykjavik hospital, where she is mothered by a kind surgeon (played with quiet warmth by Julie Christie). Fully recovered from her injuries, she sets out to find the remote village where her boyfriend was last seen alive, only to be drugged by villagers and left naked as a sacrifice at the monster’s doorstep.

Shabby and pathetic, the monster serves as a reminder of why life needs death in order to retain its dignity. This modern Grendel has really let himself go: With his long, greasy hair and dirty suit, he could be a bum in any of America’s cities. Because Beatrice takes pity on him, even after discovering that he ate her boyfriend, the monster decides to trust her with his story of cosmic disillusionment. “I tried cracking humans open to find out what makes them think they’re so special,” he laments.

Another unanswered existential problem: Why, if he has lived since the beginning of time and currently resides in upper Iceland, does the monster talk like a New York cabbie? The long, drawn-out conversation between Beatrice and the monster confirms the suspicion that this film is determined to dreamily meander as it pleases.

The handling of the monster by the news media and the government produces both the most wry, as well as the most allegorical moments of No Such Thing. Beatrice and the monster strike a deal—the monster will return to society and not kill anyone if Beatrice agrees to find the scientist who can destroy him. But what’s the use of a monster in a society that has lost its collective capacity for awe? “I mean, don’t you think the idea of a monster today is just so irrelevant?” a reporter asks the beast in a live televised interview. Not surprisingly, the media ends up being the true monster of the story. In the journalists of Beatrice’s newspaper, the barely perceptible sparks of reason, empathy and moderation are overwhelmed by the pressure for the biggest and juiciest scoop. Like all the characters, they are only slightly mythicized versions of familiar characters.

The presence of the monster stimulates a simultaneous display of both the best and the worst humanity has to offer. On the side of brutality are the thugs who beat up the monster in a back alley, and on the side of greed, there is the government researcher who tortures the monster in a mad quest for grant money. Representing the more noble aspect of humanity, there is of course Beatrice, as well as Dr. Arto, a physicist and musician bedazzled by the rhythms of the universe and endowed with the power to destroy the monster. (You’ve seen these bad scientist/ good scientist types before, consider E.T. and A Beautiful Mind, respectively.) Overall, there is nothing particularly original about these stereotyped characters, but in the context of this monster fable, they seem as surreal and whimsical as the creatures from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

As a commentary on the future of humanity after Sept. 11, No Such Thing serves as an alternative to the current spate of nationalistic war movies. However, for all its whimsical parody, the film falls far short of a clear conclusion about monsters and mayhem in the modern world. The monster’s disgust with history and evolution is so exagerrated that we lose out on any millenial 2001: A Space Odyessey-type insights. Perhaps if his character hadn’t been written so inebriated and whiny, the monster could have held up a more penetrating criticism of his human nemesis.

film

No Such Thing

Directed By Hal Hartley

Starring Sarah Polley, Robert John Burke

American Zoetrope