While conspiracy theories, phone sex lines, and television psychics might not seem immediately connected, they offer two important things for those who feel their life is slipping out of their grasp: answers and control. Convoluted explanations for unfathomable events give reason to a world that can often seem irrational, unfair and arbitrary. Meanwhile, dialling strangers for sex and revelations about what the future holds, gives the illusion that seeking pleasure and knowing what lays ahead is firmly at your disposal. They are temporary fixes for a particular kind of gnawing anxiety , and in “Buster’s Mal Heart,” writer/director Sarah Adina Smith explores what happens when that unease can’t be quelled, and is coupled with insecurity and the disappointment of dashed dreams.
The film opens with Buster running from the police, chased through wintry wooded mountains as gunshots follow him into the brush. A wanted man, this could be his last stand, but to learn how he got to this point, Smith spends the bulk of the rest in the film in flashback, when Buster was known as Jonah. Played with tightly coiled simmering tension by Rami Malek, Jonah is trying “strive, smile, succeed” — as it says on an inspirational note in the breakroom — as much as he can at his hotel concierge job near the airport. He and his wife Marty (Kate Lyn Sheil) dream of buying land out in the country, leaving “the system” behind, and raising their toddler daughter (a very adorable Sukha Belle Potter). But for now, those ambitions are on hold, with the young family living with Marty’s parents. And for Jonah, the future is all or nothing — he will not brook any conversation with Marty about compromise, such as finding an apartment in the interim that they can live in until they have enough money to get the land they desire. Meanwhile, away from home, Jonah’s long nighttime hours at the hotel allow for paranoia to start taking root, and upon crossing paths with a conspiracy driven young man (DJ Qualls), starts taking seriously the talk of Y2K and the coming “ inversion.” As all of this is absorbed by Jonah, we see the roots planted of the solitary, bearded, deranged man known as Buddy, that he’ll become. Nicknamed by the locals whose homes he raids for supplies, it’s in this persona that he’ll call those psychics and sex workers for answers and reassurance, as he lives off the grid, but perhaps not quite as he imagined when first dreaming of his life with Marty.
Straddling the line between darkly comic and dramatically absurd, “Buster’s Mal Heart” at least at first seems like a decently effective metaphor for a specific kind of male breakdown that can manifest when one believes they’ve failed some kind of societal expectation of success. But what is mostly carefully balanced early on, starts leaning hard toward the surreal as the picture pivots in the second half, with the script seemingly turning toward providing answers, only to open up new avenues of consideration, and eventually breaking things open again toward the conclusion to leave even bigger questions on the table. It’s a gambit that when employed effectively can be enormously satisfying — see Denis Villeneuve’s terrific capper to “Enemy” — but more often than not, it can feel like a filmmaker struggling to find figure out where their narrative is ultimately going. Indeed, in “Buster’s Mal Heart,” many of the intriguing thematic ideas in the first half of the picture, are left adrift in favor of trying to keep the audience on its toes.
This leaves the movie more conceptually interesting than actually entertaining. The punctuations of humor throughout tend to be countered with stretches where more puzzle pieces are laid out. Boldly weird imagery — such as Buddy squatting on a kitchen counter and taking a shit in a pot — is often introduced, but sometimes seems to having no bearing on the story at hand. And as the story branches into multiple directions, it can be intriguing to watch them unfurl, more than to try and follow them. Indeed, for all the work Malek puts into his performance, “Buster’s Mal Heart” always seems at a remove, and while there might be enough for those who actively decide to try and intellectually figure out the various dimensions of the story, I’m not so sure that effort would result in a satisfying reward.
Featuring frogs, sphincters, and blood, Smith’s picture certainly presents plenty of oddball material to sift through. However, with at least a couple of seeming end points to “Buster’s Mal Heart,” and a conclusion that feels like a bit of cheat, mileage with the movie may vary on how willing you are to enjoy the journey more than the substance, which is tends becoming slighter as the movie progresses. Or perhaps this is the greatest trick that “Buster’s Mal Heart” pulls off — that just like it’s lead character seems to learn, trying to get a handle on all of life’s answers is futile. [C]
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