Week of May 4, 2006, Issue #550
FILM
Film forgets to tell us why we should give a Hoot and not pollute
NICHOLAS TAM / nick@vueweekly.com
Hoot is the kind of film that critics hate to hate, an abortive marriage of the well intentioned and the patently ridiculous.How it sustains a façade of social importance for 90 minutes without presenting its characters with a single challenging decision is a mystery better answered by scholars of ineffective propaganda.
Based on the young adult novel by Carl Hiaasen, Hoot follows the story of Roy Eberhardt (Logan Lerman), a teenage cowpoke robbed of his free-roaming childhood in the hills of Montana when his family moves to Coconut Cove, an idyllic Florida town with a ubiquitous Jimmy Buffett soundtrack.
On his off-hours, Roy stalks the mysterious Mullet Fingers (Cody Linley), a runaway ecoteur with an aversion to footwear and social order who aims to hijack the construction of a franchised pancake house. Predictably, they join forces and take on the Man.
At one point, Mullet Fingers takes Roy on a wild excursion into the heart of the Florida he is fighting to preserve, in a swampland interlude that is probably intended to serve as some kind of awakening to the inviolable beauty of nature and what a shame it would be to eat pancakes there instead of playing spot-the-gators.
It convinces Roy, but not the audience. The inert photography and the washed-out colour palette fail to evoke a basic sense of vivacity. Nothing distinguishes the Florida au naturel from the Florida of developed beachfronts and tropical suburbia. We are never shown, though often told, that the patch of land at stake is worth saving.
In place of a subtle aesthetic tilt is a spoon-fed system of morality that indulges in self-defeating caricature—when it’s not busy contradicting its own premises. We learn, for instance, that it’s not really vandalism if the damage is reversible, that the best defence against a middle-school bully is an alliance with a bigger one, and that the gentleman in the suit on the bulldozer (Clark Gregg) is wholly evil because he shouts at women and his name is Muckle.
As if to ensure the total absence of ethical ambiguity, there is one disturbing scene where the cackling Muckle goes on a rampage snuffing out innocent owls as they lay in their burrows, a bizarre conjunction of bombing caves in Afghanistan and clubbing baby seals. But perhaps it is foolish to expect a multidimensional villain from a movie whose closing credits roll to a song entitled “Good Guys Win.”
The irony is that for all the pretences of civil disobedience, the kids only manage to defend what the law already protected—an accomplishment, but not meaningful change.
Look elsewhere for bully metaphors that make sense, environmental dilemmas that posit a conflict of balanced interests and film direction that exhibits competence.
Juvenile ecoterrorism deserves a better spokesperson. V
Opens Fri, May 5
Hoot
Written & Directed by Wil Shriner
Starring Logan Lerman, Brie Larson,
Cody Linley