Mark Reviews Movies: ACUTE MISFORTUNE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 2, 2020

The artist focused upon in Acute Misfortune states that he's not complicated, which is true, but also not one-dimensional, which is also true. He's Adam Cullen, an Australian artist who died in 2012 at the age of 46, after gaining some renown in his home country.

In the film, the man looks like a punk or, on another extreme, a neo-fascist of sorts, with his shaved head and bushy beard—not to mention his affinity for painting violent men and for swastika tattoos. If you came across the guy on the sidewalk while alone in the middle of the night, you might cross to the other side. If you got caught up listening to him at a party, you might be fascinated for about five minutes, until you realized that he kept saying the same nihilistic things over and over again—only with different words or, sometimes, the same ones.

Co-writer/director Thomas M. Wright's debut film doesn't denounce Cullen, but it definitely doesn't idolize him, as some stories about proposed geniuses of the tortured and/or controversial varieties are wont to do. The story comes the biography of Cullen by Erik Jensen, an Australian journalist who co-wrote the script with Wright and who figures as the other primary figure in this film. Jensen spent about four years talking to, hanging out with, and even living with Cullen, who asked the writer to be his biographer after a brief interview for a feature in the newspaper for which Jensen was writing.

The journalist was 19 at the time—accomplished for his age but still a bit naïve about life and the business. There had to have been some considerable appeal for him to be enlisted by Cullen, who had won a prestigious award for his art and became the youngest artist ever to have a retrospective exhibition of his work in New South Wales. In this film and likely in reality, Adam, played by Daniel Henshall, presents himself as an enigma—a man who offers nothing or only little bites of supposed wisdom to strangers, hopefully enticing them to try to get a bit closer.

Erik, played by Toby Wallace, takes the bait, earns Adam's trust, suffers some and then more and more from the artist's assorted issues, and gradually realizes that the mystery of the man might lean more toward the one-dimensional than the complex. He gets a good story out of it, at least.

Smartly, Wright doesn't play this material for horror or tragedy, although there is plenty of both, as Erik becomes caught up in the artist's renegade appeal and Adam's health begins to decline on account of drug abuse or cancer or both. We're never entirely sure if the artist's later declaration that he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer is the truth or some kind of twisted lie, attempting to earn sympathy from one of the few people—if not the only person—who still talks to him, has a reason to listen to what he has to say, and can generally put up with his company.

We for certain see that Adam has a regular heroin habit. Cab drivers in the area battle for his fare on the artist's weekly ventures to his dealer. It's an easy couple-hundred bucks: They take him there, wait, and drive him home, only briefly stopping for Adam to get a cup of coffee. His eventual decay—from a hefty man to one who looks as if a quick gust of wind could bowl him over—could be the result of cancer, or it could simply be the drug use.

The tone here is surprisingly neutral, while the mood is almost laid-back—aside from the moments when Adam's need for attention or tests of the journalist's trust turn violent. On their first outing away from the artist's compound of a home, where he may have as many illegal firearms as he does pieces of his art lying around, Adam takes Erik on a hunting trip and accidentally—or, based on his ominously casual reaction, "accidentally"—shoots the writer in the leg. Later, going for a ride on a motorcycle, Erik reflexively grabs Adam's waist following an unexpected bump. In response, Adam speeds up a bit and pushes Erik off the bike. That incident is unmistakably intentional.

Wright mostly observes this relationship and, through disjointed and elliptical editing, gives us a sense of how time becomes meaningless within its sphere. The artist talks and talks and talks. The journalist scribbles down notes in shorthand on a pad of paper (Adam, in his growing paranoia and self-destruction, grabs the notepad at one point, either having learned shorthand to keep tabs on Erik or wanting the writer to believe that he has, just to keep him in line).

We learn some things about Adam's past, mostly to do with a happy childhood that seems counter to how crudely he depicts his mother (played by Geneviève Lemon), and after a shock about the eventual publication of his biography, Erik distances himself from the artist without abandoning him entirely. They are friends, after all—or at least as much as Adam will allow such a two-way relationship into his self-centered existence.

The film just watches all of this unfold, and it's disturbing and mysterious, yes, but also fascinating. On its face, Acute Misfortune is about the rise of one character, in his career and his gradual escape from a troubling situation, and the fall of another. That fall, though, is presented with a tough but sympathetic view.

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