In which our protagonists turn out to be antagonists and our antagonists turn out to be antagonists.
Director: Zack Parker
Writers: Kevin Donner, Zack Parker
Cast: Alexia Rasmussen, Alexa Havins, Kristina Klebe, Joe Swanberg
Runtime: 120 mins.
2013
Proxy is fundamentally deceptive. It's the kind of movie that makes you hate everybody, then tricks you into hating them for all new reasons that subsequently turn out not to be true. It tries to be high-minded and succeeds in being low-brow. It's a massive crock of M. Night Shyamalan plot twists, if Shyamalan turned out to be a teenager and also a sadist. It's like wandering through a winding maze full of cupboards, and behind each cupboard is a punch in the face. Proxy is deliberately designed to be a face-punching labyrinth.
So why, instead of just being hateful, is it also boring?
The movie's only effective sequence happens immediately. Our protagonist Esther (Alexia Rasmussen) is having a baby doctor appointment because she is very pregnant. She talks to the baby lady and sees the baby via sonogram, after which she leaves. The camera follows her for a while, opening credits rolling. Then she is brutally assaulted by a red-hoodied figure springing from an alleyway. The figure knocks her unconscious with a brick, then proceeds to--and this remains difficult for me to type, the moment was so effective--pulverize Esther's womb with the brick. After this, red hoodie absconds, and Esther is rushed to a hospital, where the doctors rip the dead baby from her belly before her very eyes.
I describe this scene to you both as sort of a stand-in for a plot summary, and so that you will not need to see this movie. What happens afterwards is 60% inconsequential and 85% stupid.
Basically, Esther has a girlfriend (Kristina Klebe), an angry lesbian type of character who only shows up halfway through the movie. Also, Esther meets a woman named Melanie (Alexa Havens) at a mothers in mourning group and they become friends. Melanie is married to the doofus Joe Swanberg, who I already knew was a terrible director but--twist ending!--turns out to be a terrible actor too. These are our characters. For a while they seem boring, but then they all turn out to be psychopaths.
This entire film is predicated on the success of its twists. What that means is you'll spend most of the movie not understanding why things are happening, which basically blows the hope for anything close to a character arc out the window. We don't know someone's motivations, and then we finally do. That may sound exciting, but it's exactly the kind of smoke and mirrors BS that destroys all signs of life in contemporary thrillers. For an incomparably better version of what Proxy attempts to be, watch Soderbergh's last movie, Side Effects.
It never becomes clear why the main character was pregnant in the first place.
It never becomes clear why red hoodie (guess which of the three other characters she twists out to be) wanted to brick the baby.
It sort of becomes clear why Melanie lies about her child being dead.
It only vaguely becomes clear why Esther assaults Melanie's family like she does.
It never was clear to begin with why Esther is having sex with men at bars in dirty bathrooms for no reason, despite her sexuality and being in a relationship. Honestly this happens, and my best guess is that she wanted to be pregnant again (??) but that never happens or is even alluded to (????).
It's like Zack Parker is flinging sacks of poo onto the page/screen and hoping blindly that some of it will creep you out.
There's a certain lynchpin sequence about halfway through the movie that is heavily featured in the trailer. Justifiably so--the sequence of a character falling slow motion into a bloody bathtub is rapturous, devoid of context as it is. It made me want to watch the movie.
That moment in the film is the moment I wrote Proxy off. Until then, I maintained the idea that the narrative might be going somewhere that could make something half-sensible out of its many loose threads. But as I watched the perplexing sequence of events that caused the character to plunge into the bloody water, a plunge that was juxtaposed with a few truly hilarious slow motion shots of Joe Swanberg's scrunchy agony face, I laughed. The movie became unintentionally comical after that scene, until it just got dull.
0.5 / 5 BLOBS*
*This blog's lowest score yet!
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