Wilson

"Wilson," starring Woody Harrelson, is a movie spoiled for talent, all of it under-utilized or frustratingly misappropriated.

This criticism mostly concerns the supporting cast (who are mostly women, a fact which is highlighted here in a certain feminist-baiting flavor of promotional clip tacked on in the bonus section of the Blu-ray, a misguided trend that I've noticed for the past two years or so - in this case, the feature is titled, "The Women of Wilson"), whose misuse is a series of glaring, unforced errors, one after another: Laura Dern can't play dumb, or quite pull off the laggard affectations of her character, a grunge-era teenager inhabiting a middle-aged woman; Judy Greer is typecast as the convenient, approachable romantic interest; and even reliable supporters like Margo Martindale and Cheryl Hines can't elevate their bare-bone bit parts.

That leaves the titular antihero, Wilson. Unlike the characters that surround him, Wilson is complicated. To call him a misanthrope would be reductive; he's brash, but not un-friendly; he's sedentary, but reactive; he's gloomy, but romantic - I'd say he was poorly written if I didn't personally know so many people exactly like him.

Wilson is too complex, too real, for Harrelson to resort to the grumpy-cute caricature I was expecting. Instead, he drills down, expertly juggling a character who is lonely, bitter, saccharine, and smug - sometimes all in one exhausting breath. The problem is, of course, Wilson is not the type of person you want to spend ninety-four minutes alone with.

But if "American Splendor" proved that the miserable everyman is a viable character, then I have to blame director Craig Johnson for rendering his cast's efforts so inert. Johnson badly misinterprets Daniel Clowes' episodic screenplay (adapted from his graphic novel). Instead of exploring what constitutes human connection - Clowes' original intent, I believe - Johnson shoehorns in his obsession with 'adulting', an already exhaustively-mapped territory (and a flag he's planted in his previous films, "True Adolescence" and "The Skeleton Twins"). The result is a movie drawn and quartered by its artists' conflicting motives.

Although most of the deleted scenes included here are superfluous connective tissue jettisoned for the sake of running time, some of it might have served Clowes' thesis. One scene, a confrontation between Wilson and his dying father, supplies the emotional momentum that justifies Wilson's sudden impulsiveness, the squirmy trajectory from one cringe-worthy event to the next; another exposes the tension within Dern's character, Pippi, who's torn between the necessity of self-preservation and Wilson, an instrument of comfortable self-destruction come shambling out of her past.

These cuts illuminate what was surely a challenging screenplay - the spiritual successor to "Ghost World" perhaps - and it required making an unpleasant man pleasant to watch, something of a high-wire act in filmmaking. "Wilson," however, doesn't even come close; it's Johnson's directorial face plant.

"Wilson"
Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD
$25.99
https://www.foxconnect.com/wilson-2.html