In THE PAPERBOY, addressing three concerned sunbathers hovering over the reddened body of Zac Efron, Nicole Kidman utters one of the most memorable ‘hands off my man’ declarations in modern cinema. ‘Get away you bitches; if anyone is going to urinate on him, it is going to be me.’
Frustrated by the indifference of Kidman’s character, Charlotte, Efron’s character, Jack, takes an ill-advised dip in the Atlantic, somewhere off the Florida coast, and has an allergic reaction to jellyfish. One of the sunbathers suggests that urine is the best antidote; hence the line. While director Lee Daniels (PRECIOUS) has no interest in showing Jack and Charlotte eventually making love, two-thirds of the way through the movie, he has no compunction about showing Charlotte go to the little girl’s room on Jack.
There is a very real sense that Kidman widdles on Efron in the movie; she gives one of her better performances. Efron is very much the weak link in this 1960s-set ensemble piece in which Matthew McConaughey, David Oyelowo, Scott Glenn, John Cusack and especially Macy Gray, as the mother Jack never acknowledges, take turns in mesmerising us with their intensity. He is believable as a mother’s boy, but his character doesn’t not extend much beyond Oedipal longing.
The screening I attended - at screen six of Cineworld Fulham Road on a Friday night in the movie’s fourth weekend of UK release (5 April 2013) - was pretty full and for good reason: Kidman’s beach toilet scene is something to see. There is also what Cusack has described in interviews as ‘the telepathic sex scene’. Cusack plays Hillary Van Wetter, a low-life soil thief who has been convicted of the murder of a local police chief, a feared pot-belly of a man. Charlotte writes to him. She describes him as the first man who didn’t reply with extensive descriptions of his sexual fantasies. No, Hillary saves that for their first meeting. ‘Spread your legs slightly apart,’ he purrs whilst Charlotte sits flanked by Jack, his journalist brother, Ward (McConaghey) and his brother’s writing partner, Yardley (Oyelowo). ‘Now, tear off your pantyhose.’ A simulated orgasm (on her side) and an actual one (on his) follow. In an attempt to get to the truth of his conviction, the three men don’t know where to look.
The film elicited boos at its Cannes Film Festival premiere last May (2012) from audiences who, frankly, didn’t get it. These were predominantly women from the ‘class moyen’ (to quote from DANS LA MAISON) who found the material distasteful. They are certainly not the target audience for Pete Dexter’s source novel, adapted by the author and Daniels. Dexter writes about repellent, reptilian males and the women they attract. He’s a crime writer, whose novel PARIS TROUT was filmed by Stephen Gyllenhaal (father of Jake and Maggie) in 1991 with Dennis Hopper (the sadistic sleaze du jour) and Barbara Hershey in the leads.
PARIS TROUT put racism front and centre; a racially-intolerant store owner (Hopper) is put on trial for the murder of a young African-American girl in Georgia. (Thank you, trusty copy of Halliwell’s Film Guide.) In THE PAPERBOY, racism simmers in the background, but there is also something else. We wonder about Ward’s relationship with Yardley and why – judging by the scars on his face – does he look like he has swallowed a fish hook?
The film begins with Jack rueing his lost ability as a swimmer; he later reveals that he was ejected from university for draining the college pool. ‘The world is full of angry kids like you,’ Charlotte tells him. He really misses his mother, who left newspaper man pop (Glenn) for a new life in Tucson. Father meanwhile employs Jack ostensibly to deliver newspapers, which he tosses from the boot of a car. He is not happy but cheers up when Ward comes home, sent by the Miami Herald, to prove the innocence of Hillary with Londoner Yardley in tow. ‘Which part of London do you come from?’ asks Jack. ‘All over,’ replies the elocution-perfect man.
Our narrator is the family maid (Gray) who has a joshing relationship with Jack; when Jack complains of her walking in on him whilst he could have been masturbating (yes, it is that sort of movie), she pretends to be him and he walks in on her. Jack’s hormones go into over-drive when Charlotte arrives at Ward’s makeshift office, ostensibly a garage, carrying two boxes of papers, evidence that may help prove her fiancé’s innocence; their prison correspondence is right at the bottom.
Hillary has an alibi; he was stealing soil from a golf course at the time with his uncle, who lives with him in the swamp. Ward investigates the story, but the uncle does not like being called a thief. (We are treated to the obligatory alligator-gutting, intestines falling to the ground. No wonder the ‘class moyen’ didn’t like it; it made them think of their handbags and shoes.) He eventually calls Ward closer, offers him ice cream from a tub whilst a naked woman stands behind him (the contrast is shocking). Having corroborated his nephew’s alibi, he then turns against Ward. A man with a very heavy implement shows Ward and Jack off the premises. The tyres of their car have been slashed.
‘I bet you want me to suck you off,’ Charlotte tells Jack, who spends every opportunity to be closer to her. She isn’t going to do it, but confides that ‘sex is the most natural thing in the world.’ In a better neighbourhood, Jack would be jumping into swimming pools to cool down after each encounter with Charlotte or having a cold shower or even running under sprinklers. (This is the late 1960s; there are no sprinklers.) The dip in the ocean is his attempt to cool off and it does not go so well.
The film is about layers of exploitation and raw, naked self-interest. The characters live oppressively in the moment. Jack only acts as Ward’s driver to be with Charlotte, who is – for him - a substitute mother. Hillary has no interest in being spared the electric chair; he only tolerates the reporter to see his bride-to-be; when Charlotte turns up in pants (that’s trousers to my fellow Brits), he explodes. ‘You know what I see in here: pants. The wardens wear pants. The inmates wear pants. Don’t come in here wearing pants. Wear dresses.’ I’m sure there are some expletives in that speech but I edited them out. Ward is interested in Yardley and makes him his writing partner to disguise their relationship; Yardley puts up with it to get famous. Jack’s father exploits his starfish allergy for a news story, which gets syndicated. His father’s girlfriend gets his mother’s ring. The characters’ downfalls are caused by lapses of judgement; the reporter ends up tied up in a hotel room, completely naked, his face smashed in. Charlotte ends up unhappily married to her acquitted man who may, in fact, be guilty. When it comes to motivation for the murder, it is unclear; for everything else, the characters are transparent.
Jack uses the ‘n’ word with Yardley, alienating the family maid; he redeems himself at his father’s wedding (‘you can put your black hair in my food any time’). The relationship between Jack and the maid holds the film together; you can see why she forgives him, why she is the storyteller, the voice of compassion. Macy Gray has a bored drawl that is utterly compelling; her character wants for nothing except to be treated as an equal and spills iced-tea on those who disrespect her.
THE PAPERBOY does not tick any of the boxes of ‘acceptable entertainment’. It is not feel good; nor does it particularly show new insights into the darkness of human behaviour. It is a corrective to conventional representations of the 1960s, revealing its characters to be multi-layered without a visible social standard to uphold. Ward believes that everyone, even Charlotte’s menacing louse of a fiancé, deserves justice; no man should be convicted through hearsay, the physical evidence having disappeared. (The defence lawyer is real skittish when the reporter accuses him of not having done his job.) THE PAPERBOY is certainly a corrective to the world of THE HELP; here the maid is also the hero but she does not need to make an excrement pie to prove her point nor need a white woman to tell her tale. Lee Daniels has his own sense of tastefulness.
