It's like Waiting for Godot, but duller and pointless.
In Interview, Steve Buscemi (Fargo, Reservoir Dogs) plays Pierre Peders, a journalist who has to do a puff piece on Katya (Sienna Miller), an international pop movie star so big she only needs one name. Mad because he would rather be covering the brewing political crisis than wasting his time with a celebutante
, the two begin to collide. As the evening goes on, it's a game of cat and mouse as to who can get more information out of whom.
Sound boring? It is. The thing about Interview is that it's a remake of a 2003 film (of the same name) by Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh(to answer the inevitable question: yes, great-grand-nephew of the one-eared painter). And that's exciting because van Gogh was brutally murdered--shot, stabbed, and nearly decapitated--in 2004 by an Islamist terrorist who was angry about the filmmaker's short, Submission, which dealt with violence against women in Muslim societies.
Buscemi, who also directed Interview, joined the Triple Theo project, which was created by van Gogh's friends and colleagues to remake three of his movies for American audiences (Stanley Tucci and John Turturro will be doing the other two). Unfortunately, as noble a cause as Triple Theo is, that doesn't mean the film that resulted was good.
Interview is predominantly a two-character piece, with Buscemi and Miller sparring for the longest 83 minutes of my life. They spend most of the movie in her (admittedly gorgeous) Manhattan loft, drinking, yelling, cajoling, revealing, reconciling, and periodically grinding on one another.
This might make sense if they were, you know, locked in the loft against their will--since it's pretty clear neither of them wants to be with the other. But that's not the case. Buscemi just threatens to leave, or Miller screams at him to, but then nothing ever comes of it. So you're left with a movie that should have the tone of people hunkered down together against their will, but without the actual pressure keeping them there. As a result, it feels like an absurdist play (Waiting for Godot is the obvious comparison here), but without the existential meaning.
I'm sure there are some people who will find something to be gleaned from Interview--perhaps some commentary about the nature of celebrity, human relationships, and the truth. But I personally think it's a stretch. Interview attempts to set itself in reality and then flouts the rules, and that just doesn't work for me.
The resulting film is a boring hour-and-a-half of watching two immature adults sink down to the Lord of the Flies lowest for no reason and hurl bile and vitriol at each other. The thing is: I love bile and vitriol. I'd eat them for three meals a day if I could. But this movie is just a festival of pointless hatefulness, and to that I say: No Thanks.
ReelzChannel Rating: 