Review: The Paperboy

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The Paperboy

Filmmaker Lee Daniels's follow-up to the astounding Precious is, well, no Precious -- but The Paperboy may be just as memorable, if partly for the wrong reasons.

The Paperboy is an odd beast, a sweaty, gritty, bloody mashup of visual lyricism, noir clichés, social commentary and gratuitous everything. The film is nothing if not unique; not many movies combine an underwear-clad Zac Efron, retro split-screen effects, alligator guts and discussions of journalistic integrity. The problem is that The Paperboy doesn't combine these elements -- and so many others, many of them a bit off-putting -- terribly well. It's an intriguing story wrapped in sometimes ridiculous packaging.

Based on a novel by Peter Dexter, The Paperboy takes us back to 1960s Florida, where Miami newspaper reporter Ward Jansen (Matthew McConaughey) returns to his small and swampy hometown to chase a story about a sensational murder. With the help of his partner, Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo), Ward tries to prove that career felon and death row inmate Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack) was framed for the local sheriff's murder.

Also interested in Hillary's exoneration is Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), a sexy and deeply disturbed woman engaged to Hillary despite never having met him. Add to the mix Ward's hunky but girl-shy younger brother Jack (Efron) -- who's obsessed with the much older Charlotte -- and things get predictably complicated. Ward chases the story, Jack chases Charlotte and Hillary creeps out everyone he meets, while the urbane African-American Yardley doesn't quite know what to make of all the yokels.

The story is narrated in flashback by the Jansen family maid, Anita Chester (Macy Gray), who's oddly omniscient at times. The narration is one of many devices in The Paperboy that don't always work.

The Paperboy's central story is a solid bit of Southern Gothic noir wrapped in plenty of humid, visceral atmosphere. The plot is twisty and intriguing, and the film nails south Florida's sticky, swampy, gator-infested milieu. One scene at the backwater home of Hillary's Uncle Tyree (Ned Bellamy) is particularly effective, a grubby depiction of poverty-fueled rage against big-city outsiders. The Paperboy is a movie in which no one ever stops sweating, and not just from the stifling humidity.

But for all its spot-on atmospherics and throat-grabbing plotting, The Paperboy has too many missteps to be a great film. Most thrillers demand some suspension of disbelief, but The Paperboy is sometimes completely farfetched. Exhibit A is an early scene where Charlotte first meets her future husband in a prison visitation room. She all but rips off her clothes while he pleasures himself; wouldn't the guards put a stop to this immediately? (This is one of many scenes that pummel us with overwrought, gratuitous, often violent sexual variations.)

The film's visual effects also are hit or miss. The hits are the luscious, sometimes washed-out depictions of rural Florida, all dense undergrowth and pristine beaches. The misses are the split screen and multiple-image sequences, which don't really fit with The Paperboy's generally murky tone, and some slow-fade transitions between images that are more distracting than interesting.

The Paperboy's greatest weakness, however, may be the uneven acting, which the improbable casting and sometimes clunky dialog don't help. McConaughey does a passable job as Ward, a difficult part for reasons I'd best not divulge. But he's done much better work lately, especially as the hilariously grandstanding district attorney Danny Buck in Bernie and the deliciously sociopathic Joe Cooper in Killer Joe. At least McConaughey fits the part; this isn't so with Kidman, who's much too glamorous to be convincing as the shopworn, aging Charlotte. (Now and then, I also detected a hint of Aussie accent in her speech.)

More successful is Cusack as the menacing Hillary. Those who like to remember the actor as the adorably smitten Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything may be surprised at his rabid portrayal of a maniacal, hotheaded felon. (Speaking of which, Charlotte's attraction to Hillary is never fully explained. Yes, she's lonely and has long ago lost most of her self esteem, but I never really bought her fixation with dating prisoners.)

Efron, however, should find another line of work, or at least stay away from parts that require any grit or demand much empathy from audiences. I won't hate him because he's beautiful, but I will say that he isn't much of an actor. The notion that Efron's chiseled and toned babe-magnet Jack is a relative sexual naïf simply isn't believable, and Efron does nothing to convince us that he's just a nice kid who hasn't much sexual drive. What's more, he doesn't make us believe that what little drive he has could be directed toward Charlotte, a woman who could be his slightly slutty late-thirties aunt. Projecting these character traits requires more than stripping down to your underwear and flashing your dreamy eyes at everyone, which is about all Efron does in The Paperboy.

I wish I could recommend The Paperboy for the parts of it that work well. But the parts that don't really don't, and the end result is a film that, like some of its characters, falls victim to its own excesses.

Austin/Texas connections: Native Texan and University of Texas alum Matthew McConaughey has been a pillar of the Austin film community for two decades.