Stuck |
Brandi (Mena Suvari) has a problem, and it’s in her garage. The diligent but hard-partying nurse’s aide hit a man with her car last night, and his head smashed through the windshield. But the schmuck just won’t die. The premise may sound familiar: the film’s genesis was a 2001 incident in Texas. It took Stuart Gordon, who’s best known for his gleefully gory
Re-Animator, to spin this tidbit into a post-Katrina parable that’s smart, sobering, and frequently hilarious. Tom (Stephen Rea), a white-collar casualty in a rumpled trenchcoat, lies impaled on a windshield wiper with shards of glass forming a “Dutch Masters” collar around him while Brandi cavorts with her drug-dealer boyfriend and tries to pretend he doesn’t exist.
Stuck takes a turn toward pulp, but that doesn’t diminish its value as a sort of gonzo episode of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s
Decalogue. The high point comes when Brandi — her compassion time card apparently punched out — answers the bloodied Tom’s plea for help with a plea of her own: “Why are you doing this to me?”
94 minutes | Kendall Square
