B.J. Novak’s feature directorial debut, “Vengeance,” does not begin like you would expect B.J. Novak’s feature directorial debut to begin. It’s an image out of a horror movie, a dying figure in a dark and empty oil field, holding up a cell phone, desperately trying to get a signal. For a moment, it looks like producer Jason Blum got Novak to pull a Jordan Peele, jettisoning his comic comfort zone and heading into genre territory. But shortly therafter, when we meet Novak, he’s engaging in a Neil LaBute-ish back-and-forth with his buddy, hashing out sexual conquests, talking but not really talking, definitely not listening, and saying “hundred percent” a lot, to fill the silence.
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Novak, who also wrote the screenplay, plays Ben, a staff writer for the “New Yorker” (in a good running bit, people keep saying he writes for “New York magazine” and he can’t help but mutter a correction). But he knows the real cultural penetration comes from podcasting, and an opportunity for one falls into his lap: he gets a call from a hysterical Texan, who tells him, between sobs, “your girlfriend is dead.” The dead girl was not, in fact, his girlfriend; she was “a girl in my phone,” a casual, occasional hookup who described their relationship quite differently to her family. But Ben is basically a people-pleaser, so before he knows it, he’s on a plane to Texas for her funeral, and pushed into an impromptu eulogy for a girl he barely knew
(“She loved music, I know that”).
But that’s not the only reason Ben is there. Her brother Ty (Boyd Holbrook, very good) believes she was murdered, and asks Ben to help him avenge her death. “So as like, a personal boundary,” Ben explains, “I don’t avenge deaths. It’s just who I am.” But he realizes this could be the podcast material he’s been searching for, a vehicle for his vague but pointed ideas about displacement, conspiracy theories, and (yes) America. Ty is all for the idea: “Once people on Reddit find out, they’ll kill ‘em for us.”
You can imagine all sorts of ways for “Vengence” to go wrong, the kind of rakes Novak could step in dramatizing the intersection of, as Mike Huckabee once loathsomely and simplistically put it, “the bubble and the Bubbas.” But to his credit, Novak mostly avoids those land mines. His first, best move is in the crafting and playing of Ben, both of which are spot on; Novak has a firm grasp on the very smart guy who’s also, on some level, completely full of shit. (In one of his funniest scenes, he promises the family, “I will find this person, or this generalized societal force, and I will… define it.”). More importantly, he doesn’t condescend to most of the characters Ben encounters during his investigation – if anything, the little parlor trick of the screenplay, that everyone is more than they seem, gets repetitive by the story’s end.
Novak is fundamentally a comic writer, and there are plenty of funny moments (my personal favorite is when he’s busted on his phone at the rodeo: “Did you really just try to Shazam ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’?”). And he gets a lot of local details right, like the weird allegiance to Whataburger, or the list of rodeo sponsors that’s just one energy company after another. (And it’s a teeny, tiny thing, but kudos to whoever made sure the clips from the podcast sound like… clips from a podcast.) Cinematographer Lyn Moncrief captures something of the beauty of this rugged landscape. And the supporting cast is solid – particularly, surprisingly enough, Ashton Kutcher, who has the right screwy energy for his character, a local music impresario who charms Ben by seeing right through him.
It’s important not to oversell “Vengeance,” which is ultimately a fairly shallow piece of work – it goes where you expect it to go, and ticks off the pat story beats in roughly predetermined order (time for a breakthrough, time for a confrontation, time for a twist, etc.). Some of Novak’s camera sense, particularly early on, betrays his sitcom roots, and he commits the classic rookie mistake of going on three or so scenes too long, tying up inconsequential loose ends. But he crafts a good mystery, consistently engaging and entertaining, and the thoughtful turns of the last confrontation are sly, smart, and knowing. Not bad, Novak. Not bad at all. [B]
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