Review: Wrong (2012)
Cast: Jack Plotnik, Todd Giebenhain, Eric Judor
Director: Quentin Dupieux
Country: USA
Genre: Comedy | Drama
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Notes: Wrong opens in limited release on Friday, March 29th. If you’ve already seen the film we’d love to hear your thoughts on it, or if you’re looking forward to seeing it this weekend, please tell us in the comments section below or in our new Next Projection Forums.
There’s an immediate aptness to its title as Wrong begins, fading in on a cracked road surface and panning up to a group of firefighters who, sitting silently on the side of their truck, look on as a van burns by the roadside. It’s just not right, like so much of the film to follow, which was written and directed by the French surrealist Quentin Dupieux, known to most for Rubber. That film, a gleefully silly genre commentary, was “an homage to the no reason”, a philosophy Dupieux here revisits through a more traditional narrative structure. He follows Dolph, an American everyman who wakes one morning to find his beloved dog missing, and whose quest to recover his canine best friend leads to a series of strange encounters with increasingly peculiar characters.
Dupieux draws our attention to the everyday oddities we take for granted, be it the contradictory logos of fast food flyers, the faux-relationships we maintain with those around us, or the strange routines in which we enshroud ourselves.
Interestingly comparable to Blue Velvet in its early postulation of suburban perfection—the neatly trimmed lawns; the flawless white mailboxes; the neighbourly waves across the street—Wrong plays with the idea of the American Dream in much the same way as Lynch’s film in its own opening scene, confirming this paradisiacal image before supplanting it entirely. Dupieux draws our attention to the everyday oddities we take for granted, be it the contradictory logos of fast food flyers, the faux-relationships we maintain with those around us, or the strange routines in which we enshroud ourselves. An early shot, the camera trained on Dolph’s bedside clock as it switches from 7:59 to—nope—7:60, is the first of Dupieux’s many prods at the established order, playfully toying with convention and familiarity in such a way as to invoke us to consider the underlying oddity of everyday life.
Lynch, come to consider him, offers an interesting point of contrast for Dupieux, whose surrealism is often similar in approach while entirely different in effect. In the likes of Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, Lynch delivers familiar depictions of all-American life distorted through his unique lens, the eeriness of his visual style and oddity of his narrative direction contributing a strangeness of tone that basks his characters—and by proxy his audience—in a disquieting atmosphere of oppression. Dupieux, rather than deploy surrealist tactics for such creepy effect, uses it primarily for humour’s sake, the absurdity of his plotting such that laughter is often the only rational response. It’s at once the film’s greatest weakness and strength, this humour: as amusing as it is to see William Fichtner play a ponytailed dog psychic, the cumulative effect of so many non-sequiturs can grow wearisome. Though not quite so tiresome as Rubber, which had its sole surreal gag stretched to breaking point, Wrong will try the patience of all but the most dedicated fans of Dupieux’s absurdist inclinations.
Dupieux, rather than deploy surrealist tactics for such creepy effect, uses it primarily for humour’s sake, the absurdity of his plotting such that laughter is often the only rational response. It’s at once the film’s greatest weakness and strength, this humour: as amusing as it is to see William Fichtner play a ponytailed dog psychic, the cumulative effect of so many non-sequiturs can grow wearisome.
Absurdism is precisely the word to best describe this work: Dupieux is evidently a firm believer in the inherent meaninglessness of life, his tangential narrative style—loosely hopping from scene to scene, character to character—depicting a world where everything happens on a whim. Yet whatever accusations of aimlessness could be levelled against the film, it’s impossible to deny its conviction, the vim with which it commits itself to its oddity abundant from the outset. As he ably proved with his desert vistas in Rubber, Dupieux is a talented visualist, well attuned to using the camera to make his points. Here he plays extensively with focus, his conversations almost entirely shot over-the-shoulder with the non-speaker visible only as an amorphous blur in the distance, accentuating the divide between these characters and the emptiness of human communication.
Wrong is neither a story nor film that makes any sort of sense whatsoever, and that’s precisely the point: as a reflection of life, it highlights the meandering madness of mortality, the sheer senselessness of being. Always with a wry smile on his face, Dupieux uses the framework of archetypal Americana—and the seemingly exemplary life of Dolph—as a commentary on the frustrating dissatisfaction of everything around us, the regular emptiness of the day-to-day experience. In dwelling on this, and in lampooning it and finding humour in its little eccentricities, he comes to show just how important it is for us to appreciate the little things. His film never quite satisfies, and often feels incomplete, but then so too does life. What it is, like the companionship of a loyal and loving dog, is a little oasis of joy in the sparse desert of existence.
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