Ben Manalowitz is a self-important windbag, not a terribly good writer. And it’s hard to tell exactly how much B.J. Novak is aware of this, starring as the character in a film that is also his feature screenwriting and directing debut. Vengeance is about said writer, an Ivy League-educated New Yorker columnist, convinced of his own revelatory insight into the American divide, who then finds himself in west Texas due to the apparent misunderstood relationship status of a young woman whom he had hooked up with a few times and has died suddenly of a drug overdose. He’s there in a capacity he hasn’t earned, fulfilling a role he doesn’t embody, and convinces himself of an unwarranted nobility in how he exploits the situation. It sure seems openly out of touch. But there’s a constant sense of apologia coupled with this character, an earnestness in his desires and drive that’s not so questioned. After all, in some ways he’s not so different from his creator.
A few months back, B.J. Novak briefly trended on Twitter for comments he made suggesting a Harvard education like his was actually more a detriment to a successful writing career than a benefit -that it in no way helped him get the jobs that would launch his career. And it’s very much the kind of thing that Ben Manalowitz would say, a man who can’t help but condescend, accidentally or not, to every rural Texan he interacts with. Certainly Novak is more than convincing in the role of this vapid East Coast intellectual, though he is treated by the script as the straight man for this as much as the boon. In the early goings of the film he resembles a Woody Allen protagonist, especially in his wry conversations with other affluent-types about current social themes. But as the film progresses he becomes much more of a Sullivan’s Travels figure -the privileged creative looking to infiltrate and understand working-class America, but in a totally superficial, self-aggrandizing sense.
That of course is a terrific starting place for a satire, and Vengeance lives up to it fairly well early on. Not breaking to the Shaw family that he didn’t actually know Abby very well, Ben goes down for her funeral in some middle-of-nowhere small town, where shortly after her brother Ty (Boyd Holbrook) ropes him into investigating her death as a potential murder and getting revenge. Ben goes along with it for the purposes of turning that paranoia into a podcast ostensibly about grief and denial, rural America and several other profuse ideas he reads into their simple lives. He’s sure their suspicions are unfounded, but he can’t pass up the chance to aestheticize their way of life for urban listeners.
Ben has only an abstract perception of the folks he interviews and spends time with -they are subjects, not people. He questions their routines and only seems interested in their personalities as far as they support the thesis of his podcast. He can’t read the room and in one scene, put on the spot at a rodeo, describes his job to a crowd as though he were talking to a four-year old unaware of the concept of writing. His arc would resemble one of a man coming to understand and appreciate this different culture, growing closer to the family he spends time with and reckoning with his own prejudices. And yet the film itself seems happy to caricature these folks all on its’ own, such as in a scene where the family can’t give a definitive reason why they prefer so much their local fast food chain beyond circular logic, or one daughter called Kansas City (Dove Cameron) having aspirations to just be famous as a career goal. The youngest son (Eli Abrams Bickel) is affectionately(?) called “El Stupido”by his family -it sure seems that the movie is participating in the same uninformed conflations as Ben’s podcast.
The one figure to break his stereotype is Quinten Sellers (Ashton Kutcher), an educated record producer who knew Abby and made demos with her. He can make references and muse on topics that Ben can relate to and through him and the USB he lends Ben of Abby’s recordings, Ben gets a better sense of who she was. The idea is that he comes to see her in a more human light, and by extent, her family. Although it still feels like the movie grasping at something out of reach, perhaps due to Novak’s performance conveying little evolution. He becomes more enthusiastic and marginally more empathetic, he even starts to view the murder suspicions with more validity. But he still maintains an air of casual superiority that isn’t shaken, and of course the character undoes a lot of goodwill by vocalizing this sentiment wholesale in a much-anticipated outburst scene late in the second act. Meanwhile Holbrook, for the limited expression of his character, is charming all throughout -and the movie would have been better had it focused more ardently on the dynamic between Ty and Ben. I’d also say that Kutcher is a surprising highlight, playing well a kind of laid back demeanour that is at times both calming and chilling.
This proves especially effective in the last act where he and the movie itself challenge Ben and the innate egotism of his whole enterprise. What the movie ultimately does that is so fascinating is implicate the media machine and its’ relationship to human instincts and tragedies -the very machine that Ben is an avatar of. What he’s been after is a story, but in our modern world stories can shift, their contexts can be redefined by even just a few bad actors. All the while the meaning is lost. We see it all the time, the way it is illustrated here brings to mind most immediately the frenzy around the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial where truth lost out to the greater story that had been shaped. Media, news, and indeed podcasts spin narratives, and sooner or later, Ben will be the bad guy in the public’s eye. Ben’s not callous, whatever else may be said of him, but he is part of the circus, and in amplifying this family tragedy he has already set wheels in motion for the media to consume it in whatever frenetic and harmful way it dictates. A powerful statement on the blindness of neoliberal journalism, and a bold one that I appreciate Novak making -but it still feels undercut by the movies’ lack of distinction in purpose elsewhere. And in the end Ben makes a choice that allows him to run away from his culpability, as he had accused the Shaws from doing earlier with their apparent denial of the circumstances of Abby’s death.
But then again it’s hard to tell if this isn’t Novak’s intention. If Ben doing the wrong and easy thing is meant to only augment the main point. It works that way in any case, Novak’s grim expression that’s difficult to read closes out the movie. I don’t know that he’s all that compelling a director but his vision is certainly intriguing -even if I don’t think it works quite the way he intends it to. Vengeance is a movie less about its’ titular theme than it is an examination of culture in America in this moment in time. The differences in geographical and class cultures (Ben begins the movie telling Issa Rae this isn’t a source of national division before proving that it is), education levels and lifestyles, and the way that culture is wielded as a weapon both on a micro and macro level to the detriment of human connection. Novak at the very least deserves credit for interrogating that.
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