Movie Review: Saint John craps out in Las Vegas
Saint John of Las Vegas
Starring: Steve Buscemi, Romany Malco, Sarah Silverman, Peter Dinklage
Directed and written by: Hue Rhodes
Running time: 85 minutes.
PG: coarse language, adult themes, sexual situations.
Two stars out of five
It is difficult to say what is supposed to be going on in Saint John of Las Vegas, a fatally quirky little independent film that has the good sense to make Steve Buscemi its leading man but doesn’t know what to do with him.
The bug-eyed supporting actor doesn’t get many shots at carrying a picture, and it’s a shame that rookie filmmaker Hue Rhodes wastes him in this semi-caper movie. It’s either that or a character study — it’s hard to tell.
Saint John of Las Vegas appears to have something to do with The Divine Comedy (Buscemi’s character’s name is Johnny Alighieri), but most of it is set in that special circle of hell reserved for self-conscious indies and their beleaguered audiences: the characters who substitute oddness for reality, the disregard for plot development, the sacrifice of cohesion at the altar of that great god, Irony.
In its favour are the fact it’s only 85 minutes long, and it has an interesting cast. Buscemi’s Johnny is a reformed gambler who has fled Vegas for Albuquerque, N.M. (”I drove until I ran out of gas and here I am.”) He’s now an adjuster at an insurance company, and although he still has the urge to gamble, he confines himself to scratch-and-lose lottery tickets in games with names such as Who’s your Daddy and MegaMegaMega. in the opening scene, he’s about to buy $1,000 worth of tickets at a gas station. The story is framed around how he obtained that $1,000.
Johnny’s boss, Mr. Townsend (Peter Dinklage, for once playing a character whose height doesn’t enter into it), decides to try him on a higher calling, fraud investigation. with a veteran investigator named Virgil (Romany Malco from The 40-Year-Old Virgin), Johnny is to go to Vegas to look into the case of a stripper named Miss Tasty D Lite who has crashed her 1970 Buick Wildcat and now wants $180,000 in compensation.
The resulting road trip takes Virgil and Johnny through what is apparently meant to be a kind of American Inferno, visiting car junkyards, desert strip clubs, carnivals, and casinos. Johnny has a certain desperation — a Buscemi trademark — but it appears to be less a problem of existential doubt and more a feeling of exasperation with the incoherent plot.
He works at making Johnny a recognizable person, but he’s written as a collection of tics.
“I used to be lucky,” he tells us in voice-over. “I didn’t have to order the usual. they brought it to me. Chomped.” but nothing about Johnny leads us to believe he was ever such a person, and the movie’s romance — Johnny is having an affair with Jill, the office secretary, played with loopy abandon by Sarah Silverman — is also free of any rational possibility.
The movie’s surreal setpieces — a woman in a wheelchair performing a lap dance; a carnival human torch called The Flame Lord who’s trapped in his fireproof suit; a group of naked and armed men (led by Tim Blake Nelson) at the entrance to a desert nature preserve — play as a disconnected series of oddities that make no real point.
The Coen Brothers can take this kind of material and weave it into a universe of straight-faced absurdity, but in this film, it becomes a collection of irritating in-jokes. The recurring motif of a happy face is particularly grating.
There are one or two nice moments, mostly involving minor characters, charming oddballs of the type who, in normal circumstances, might have been played by Buscemi. he deserves applause for lending his indie cred to a young filmmaker, but he deserves better than this.
