A few weeks ago I had the great opportunity to visit the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, TX. I only spent three days there, but out of the eight films I saw there was only one that I highly recommend seeing once it hits theaters. The film is called Hesher (2010), and let me tell you, it’s the kind of indie film that reeks of originality and candidness. The cast is superb, the humor is down-right dirty, and the dialogue crackles with witty one-liners.
Hesher is a quirky black comedy that never lets up with its mordant sense of humor. In the spirit of Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and The Good Girl (2002), here is an indie flick with the right amount of rudeness, humor, and heart. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Inception and Mysterious Skin) leads the cast as Hesher; a loser with no direction in life. Hesher lives in his van, never washes his grungy long hair, and lives to feed off other people, and their own misery. He’s a nihilistic tool in the worse sense, but still, the veteran 20-something actor, Levitt, has the uncanny ability of exuding a certain charm about this misfit of an asshole character. Furthermore, in reality, the actor transforms from a nice Jewish boy from the suburbs to a pot-smoking arsonist with nothing but an attitude problem.
Hesher finds himself taking advantage of a broken-home, due to the loss of a young boy’s mother. He barges in, and he acts like it’s his own home, including watching porn in his underwear on the living room couch. This character plays on the weak and usually waits for someone to have the balls to discard his disgusting presence. Fortunately, for Hesher, the family he’s barged in on is grieving for a loss in their family, and events that take to the turn for the….well surprisingly, the better, in a more therapeutic sense.
The one that everyone hates and despises for his utter crudeness towards humanity just happens to be the very one to breath life into a broken-family, numb with emotional turmoil. At this point of the story, the writing and character development soar to another level; the poignant battles we must go through to deal with grief.
The stellar cast also includes Rainn Wilson, best known as a comedian on the hit show The Office plays the empty and forever-in-grief father. Piper Laurie plays the elderly grandmother, and I’m sorry for Carrie (1976) fans, but she does not lock up any family member in the closet to pray for forgiveness. Piper Laurie’s performance is as genuine and serene as any typical grandmother who smokes pot to help with her glaucoma. Natalie Portman plays a grocery clerk who also happens to become a part of Hesher’s whirlwind of destruction and later on, redemption. The key to the relationship between Hesher and this strange family is an adolescent boy, T.J. (Devin Brochu) played with the perfect sensibility of any angry, adolescent boy.
Hesher is the kind of indie film to take your friends out and laugh at the ridiculous, yet original dilemmas, and then, find a place in your heart to empathize with every character, no matter what bad things they might have done.
***1/2 (out of four stars)
No comments:
Post a Comment