Tusk
If ever there was a filmmaker who reinvented themselves, it was Kevin Smith. It is twenty years since the release of Clerks, the innovatively financed black and white slacker comedy filmed through the nights at the convenience store where Smith was working at the time which became the darling of the independent festival circuit.
His subsequent films varied in detail but presented the same format of lowbrow jokes against genuine emotion and featured many of the same performers in supporting roles, particularly Smith and his longtime friend Jason Mewes as Silent Bob and Jay, though 1995’s Mallrats and 1997’s Chasing Amy would feature the then almost unknown Ben Affleck who would take a lead role in 1999’s Dogma alongside his friend Matt Damon, both by that time international stars having won an Oscar for their co-written script for 1997’s Good Will Hunting.
Then in 2011, Smith released the astonishing hostage thriller Red State. Gone were the hijinks, the juvenile humour and all of Smith’s regular cameos and in came critically acclaimed heavyweight actors Michael Parks (Twin Peaks, We Are What We Are) and Melissa Leo (The Fighter, Wayward Pines) as members of a religious cult and John Goodman (Roseanne, O Brother, Where Art Thou?) as the government agent trying to negotiate for the release of the hostages they have taken.
A film about metamorphosis and chimeras, it is from both these strands which Smith has drawn in his latest venture, Tusk, and indeed he has cast former collaborators from both sides of his career, much of the film boiling down to a two hander between Parks and Drag Me to Hell’s Justin Long who had a supporting role in Smith’s 2008 feature Zack and Miri Make a Porno as an adult entertainment professional.
Podcasters Wallace Bryton (Long) and Teddy Craft (I’ll Follow You Down’s Haley Joel Osment) have made a name for themselves ritually humiliating those unfortunates who have been foolish enough to share their videotapes follies with the internet.
Travelling to Canada to interview an amateur swordsman who managed to accidentally amputate his leg (a digital special effect so shamefully lame it would have been more convincing if it had turned out to be a hoax), Wallace finds himself without purpose when it transpires his subject has killed himself.
Seeking another story, Wallace finds a lead in a handwritten note pinned to a bathroom wall; he calls the number and obtains directions to a remote country house where he meets the wheelchair bound Howard Howe who offers him tea and tells how he drank with Ernest Hemingway on the Normandy beaches and how he was lost at sea off Siberia and taken care of by a walrus he named Mr Tusk.
Both Wallace and Howard are storytellers, and outside of his podcast where the only qualification is the ability to laugh at yourself whether you are funny or not he becomes a more interesting character as the two get to know each other, though Howard is by far the superior at spinning a yarn, for in fact Wallace has been totally taken in by him.
Passing out, Wallace awakens strapped into a wheelchair himself, the man who mocked a stranger who lost a leg now finding himself minus one of his own limbs. Howard says he was bitten by a highly venomous spider, that the doctor had no choice and he was not moved to the hospital as his condition was too delicate, that his cellphone broke when he collapsed and that there is no phone in the house so his recovery will not be disturbed, but Wallace believes none of it.
With aspects of Misery, Boxing Helena and Musarañas, a helpless captive subjected to physical abuse supposedly for their own good, Smith has in some ways become a more sophisticated and subtle filmmaker than his early work would suggest, but the two worlds of Tusk do not sit easily together, the heavily disguised guest role of the French Canadian detective Guy Lapointe becoming a tiresome indulgence which seems to belong in another film altogether.
One of the more normal visitors to Twin Peaks, Parks more than makes up for it here in the insanity of his performance, every misery Wallace has inflicted upon the world turned mockingly back on him as Howard performs “a few minor modifications” with which Wallace will be able to fit inside the “very realistic walrus suit” he has constructed in order to recreate the six months of happiness he shared with Mr Tusk.
By turns profoundly disturbing and moving, it is filmed without any fantastical elements, almost asking the question of the audience, as Teddy and Wallace’s girlfriend Ally (Big Hero 6’s Génesis Rodríguez) are confronted with the situation: how would one react if this actually happened? Unfortunately even Smith himself seems uncertain, the film flolloping to its conclusion in the manner of a damp mattress, yet what has gone before certainly leaves a mark.
Tusk is now available on DVD
