Be Kind Rewind

***

Written and Directed by Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry certainly has a unique visual style. The music-video director turned filmmaker uses an array of clever (and dare I say quirky) camera tricks that create realistic worlds in the spirit of the French New Wave filtered through Lynchian peculiarity. This style worked perfectly in Charlie Kaufman’s masterpiece Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, depicting suburbia, memories, literally, in the brain, and the power of love in the same aesthetic. Perhaps the previous sentence epitomizes the problems with Gondry as well: Eternal Sunshine cannot be considered his movie. Gondry has yet to develop an intellectual or thematic framework (at least a mature or complex one) for his visionary moving picture shows. This holds true for his latest film Be Kind Rewind, a pleasant comedy in the truest sense. Gondry is playing with the camera and asking the audience to have as much fun watching the film as he did making it.

Jerry (Jack Black)—the resident eccentric of a New York suburb—lives in a junkyard and is convinced that the neighboring power plant is causing his headaches. His body is magnetized during a sabotage mission of said power plant, and wanders into the Be Kind Rewind video store run by his friend Mike (Mos Def, excellent). Mike is entrusted in the care of the store by his father figure and storeowner Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), who is on vacation trying to figure out why his video store could possibly be failing financially in the world of DVDs. Mike lives only to make Mr. Fletcher proud and is obviously distraught when the magnetized Jerry erases all of the store’s videotapes. The pair goes on to direct, “write”, and star in dozens of homemade recreations of the deleted video tapes which become a neighborhood sensation.

Gondry has his most fun during Jerry and Mike’s creation of the films. The duo’s dependence on everyday items for props, sets, and characters allows Gondry to create terrific illusions with these items; a superb recreation of when Bowman jogs in the spaceship in 2001; the use of doormat with a bird’s eye view of a neighborhood depicted on it as a backdrop for the fight on top of a building in Rush Hour; or even the white and black people’s fingers (still attached) as keys on a keyboard. These gags are fun, but by themselves don’t do much or really attract the audience (except for the obviously high kids two rows up).

Where the film (surprisingly) works is in the honestly formulated characters. Mike and Mr. Fletcher share a slight lisp, which I thought was an obvious foreshadowing to a biological connection, but turns out to be Gondry just nudging us in that direction. Mos Def doesn’t simply make Mike a dimwit or fool, but someone who just doesn’t happen to be smart. The audience can relate to Mike’s normalcy in this otherwise abnormal environment, creating an emotional centre to the film. Jack Black plays Jerry like he does all of his characters…crazy, out of touch, charming, and hilarious, but like all of Black’s characters, it works brilliantly. Black brings tons of energy to every scene he’s in, but manages to not chew up the scenery, creating an impression of chaos and simultaneous joy. Mike and Jerry work best when both are in frame, for contrast and complement, accentuating the other’s personality.

When Be Kind Rewind ended I was not struck by its profoundness, thematic complexity, moral ambiguity, or astonishing filmmaking, because none of these qualities are in the film. I felt happy. Not the end-of-a-Spielberg-film-happy, where you don’t have to earn the happiness and are manipulated into feeling that way, but genuinely honestly happy. We don’t know if the Be Kind Rewind video store succeeds, or if Mike, Jerry, and Mr. Fletcher live happily ever after, but we have faith that they do. If Gondry’s lack of intellectual depth is not going to change, I can live with this optimism.