WUSS.....my favorite Casa-nerdo (Part of Dallas International Film Festival)

            Wuss opens with a 1999 high school reunion, and the band for the party is singing a pop-rock song about 9/11. Right away, the writer/director, Clay Liford, invites the audience to a refreshing and odd black comedy, reeking of provocative and satirical overtones. After Wes Anderson’s dryly funny Rushmore (1998) and Ash Christian’s zany dark comedy, Mangus!, I get the feeling that the new generation of Texas filmmakers love to poke fun at southern suburbia.

            After our hero, Mitch (Nate Rubin), a wimpy-looking substitute English teacher, gets rejected by a woman he finds attractive, the title, “Wuss,” appears over the small man’s image in bold white letters. From there, the peculiar rhythm is established, and it rarely falls flat.

            Wuss is about a high school teacher who’s constantly threatened, intimidated, and violently picked on by a particular student and his posse of adolescent misfit friends. Mitch has a steady career, but still lives with his mother and nagging sister. Obviously, he’s too scared to find a life of his own. The bulk of the narrative revolves around the taboo relationship between our wussy hero and one of his female students, Maddie (Alicia Anthony), commonly known as “butt-whore.” Not because she’s actually a prostitute, but smokes cigarettes she find on the ground.

            The awkward tone begins to bubble-up in a scene where two of the faculty members are gossiping about Maddie, aka “butt-whore,” and the film randomly cuts to a quick shot of her picking up a cigarette off the sidewalk. The flashback shot might only last for a few seconds, but the influence behind the editing style dates back to Truffaut’s French new-wave masterpiece, Shoot the Piano Player (1960), where we see a mother keel over dead, right after a character articulates the incident. If Shoot the Piano Player dates too far back for some readers, than checkout Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut film, Hard Eight (1996), in which we cut to a random shot of a large box of matches flame-up in actor John C. Reily’s pant-pocket. Rounding out my point, the flashbacks in these films are paralleled with natural conversations, and only reveal an odd character trait, rather than an important plot-point.

Another minor aspect I enjoyed about Wuss was some of the abrupt jump-cuts, and the bold white lettering over certain scenes. These small details and stylistic editing choices bring-out the awkward visual language of the film.

            As much as I enjoyed the originality of the writing, I felt some of the portrayals were too exaggerated and a few of the performances were a bit amateurish. The dialogue might punch with a dead-pan, dryly humorous force, but some of the actors, not including the protagonist) have bad timing and delivery, which undercuts the biting dialogue.

            The bizarre depiction of a public school and smarmy faculty members refers to such indie classics as Election (1999) and Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996). The filmmaker behind Wuss won the audience award at the Dallas International Film Festival, and deservedly so. After the last screening, the audience congregated with the cast and crew for a fun and relaxing Q and A. Wuss is still working the festival circuit, but with the right connections and promotions, I’m sure it will be picked up for distribution. I wonder what kind of film the writer/director is working on next. Perhaps it will have the title, “Faggots and Retards.” (Please do not take offense; I’m just making a point about the filmmaker’s blunt humor).

*** (out of four stars)