As with his last film, BOTTLE SHOCK, Randall Miller returns to the themes of father-son relationships in NOBEL SON. While the former was a sun-drenched idyll in the wine country of Napa Valley, arch but ultimately warm and fuzzy, the latter starts in the darker environs of human behavior and then gets seriously nasty and just as seriously funny.
The father and son are Eli (Alan Rickman) and Barkley (Bryan Greenburg). The elder is a college professor who has just won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. The younger is his long-suffering son, the anthropology student who has endured years of barbed comments, and of affection doled out as parsimoniously as his allowance. That his intellectual passion and his doctoral thesis is on cannibalism is only mildly surprising considering the all-devouring nature of his father. Equally long-suffering is Eli’s wife, Sarah (Mary Steenburgen), a forensic psychiatrist who should know better than to hope for anything from such a sociopathic specimen as Eli.
Things are going swimmingly for Eli, however, banging his nubile graduate students, snarking at colleagues, and generally venting without fear of retribution or comeuppance the spleen of a genius forced to associate with lesser creatures. It’s at the very pinnacle of that swim that things begin to go south. On the heels of receiving word that he has won the top honor in his field, Eli learns that Barkley has been kidnapped and that the ransom is the full amount of the monetary award that comes with the Nobel. Eli will be left with the prestige, but somehow, that and the safe return of his son isn’t the relief it should be.
Miller and his co-writer Jody Savin have fashioned a plot as intricate, as fascinating, and as slyly tortured as the relationship between Eli and Barkely itself. Femme fatales, frustrated egos, and a police detective (Bill Pullman all easy charm and canny intelligence), caught between finding the truth and staying within the good graces of Sarah, on whom he dotes inordinately, play out with a breakneck pace and a stylish visual flair that makes this not just a clever bit of intrigue, but a smart one, as well. The kidnapper (Shawn Hatosy) is out for more than money, or the thumb that is severed almost as soon as the film begins and turns up in package later. The audience will drop its collective jaw more than once with the surprises in store.
Rickman is decidedly in his element as the arrogant bastard of the piece. There is in his sheer delight at his character’s being able to say and do whatever he wants that speaks to a guilty sort of wish fulfillment on the part of the viewer. More than that, though, he makes manifest Eli’s symbiotic need for an audience on which he can look down. Steenburgen has a harder job, selling a smart woman who remains with a man she can’t stand, but her performance, purring as it does with its own sense of unconventional undercurrents, is equally fascinating. When she speculates on the mental state of her son’s kidnapper, it is with a precise, analytical mind that is undimmed by the palpable emotional turmoil Sarah is feeling. Here is a glimpse of a scholar’s fascination with her chosen field that is a key who what makes Sarah tick and maybe why she tolerates close quarters with an impossible perosanlity. Greenburg is sweetly damaged in all the right places, Hawtosy is deliciously ambiguous about giving away whether or not his character is unhinged or merely testy, and Eliza Dushku as City Hall, that’s her name, the woman who may or may not be a lynch pin, is seductive, dangerous, but never anything so cliché as quirky, coffee house poet though her character is. Quirkiness is the province of Danny DeVito as the cuddly obsessive-compulsive neighbor. He plays the role with the sincerity of Willy Loman, making this more than a throwaway bit of color.
NOBEL SON has a mean way with its sleigh-of-hand. It’s a turbo ride funny, tragic, and disturbingly honest that keeps the audience off-balance while pondering right, wrong, good, evil, sanity, madness, and the whys and wherefores of bad poetry.
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