DVD OF THE WEEK: Spread

Spread
directed by David Mackenzie
2009, 97 minutes, USA
Anchor Bay Films

Maybe it's a misnomer to hail an Ashton Kutcher indie vehicle the week's highest recommendation (the case certainly won't be made here that it's more or less worthwhile viewing than Up, Lake Tahoe or Ballast), but Scottish director David Mackenzie and writer Jason Dean Hall's clever, pruriently entertaining satire about a sociopathic hipster grifter deserves a better shot at exposure—no pun intended—after the damning reviews it's had since Sundance. It's a film that's easy to misread and dismiss as superficial pap simply because its characters are prone to repulsively opportunistic behavior.

Playing both into and against type, Kutcher is surprisingly quite compelling as chiseled stud Nikki, a former Midwesterner-turned-L.A. scenester with no home or job, except for his well-honed ability to bed rich single women in exchange for a free ride. He meets them at parties, woos 'em quickly, moves in a few days later, and suddenly has unrestricted access to their posh pads and platinum cards. It's less American Gigolo than it is American Psycho (and other plastic-wasteland tales by Bret Easton Ellis), complete with Kutcher's guttural, Christian Bale-like voiceover smugly and indifferently detailing his misogynistic hustler tricks: Make an ass of yourself to put women at ease. Flash a sleepy smile to be able to stay much longer than the morning after. Don't fuck them too well the first night.

The first half of the film presents an Entourage-like fantasy of casual sex and materialist binging: there's more gratuitous boinking here than Screwballs, and the City of Angels itself is appropriately shot like a luxury accessory, its neon glow and slick edges emphasized. Couched in all that, however, Spread eventually reveals a gloomy raincloud of a moral meditation about unhealthy lifestyles and self-delusion. Having already worked over sexy '40s-ish lawyer Samantha (Anne Heche) and finding himself the kept boy-toy in her $5-million hilltop home (it used to belong to Peter Bogdanovich, she sighs), Nikki predictably remains insatiable. When Samantha leaves on a business trip, he throws an enormous party to impress his friends and score more pussy, yet still takes his meal ticket for granted after Samantha comes home early, catches him with some bimbo, and decides to let him stay anyway.

Nikki may be a predator, but he justifies to himself that he's being used right back, and it's that small hint of buried integrity (blink and you'll miss it) that illustrates he still has further to fall. Some have complained that the movie goes off the rails with the late entrance of Heather (Margarita Levieva), a pretty young thing with Nikki's same manipulative veneer—she, too, makes her living by conning lovers. Playing the part of the cold fish from their very first exchange at a coffee shop, Heather reluctantly warms to Nikki's goofy, confident charm. After practically yawning his way through a string of conquests, here is a girl that he can finally "be real" with, whatever that could possibly mean to him. A rather last minute subplot to the film (though most descriptions suggest otherwise), Nikki chases and sort of catches Heather while she keeps him wrapped around her diamond-digging finger, but he's neither smart enough nor emotionally prepared to realize she's a craftier grifter than him.

Spread is not actually about a shallow manipulator gaining profundity through humility; it's something more aloof, modern and depressing than that old chestnut. The film is told through Nikki's narrow point of view, so the sneaky final punchline may have been lost on some audiences wondering why Heather's character hasn't been more fully fleshed out beyond her lusty, scheming temperament: Here is a movie about a narcissist getting distraught after falling in love with himself.

Posted by ahillis at November 10, 2009 4:20 PM