Mark Reviews Movies: THE ART OF SELF-DEFENSE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 19, 2019

One of those movies that's too cool and detached for its own good, The Art of Self-Defense suggests something of a takedown of the goals and worship of ideas of hyper-masculinity. Here, a complete loser, alone and basically afraid of his own shadow, transforms into a guy obsessed with karate and, from that, the notion that he can become an actual man. There's no middle ground in the world of writer/director Riley Stearns' broadly satirical hammering of supposed ideals of manliness. By the end, the point has been defeated by the filmmaker's desire to be playfully weird above all else.

In fact, if not for a last-minute monologue from the only woman in the movie who's deemed worthy enough to have a speaking role, one could be forgiven for assuming that Stearns' ultimate point is essentially the same as his story's villain. A good speech can re-assert a point. It's not, though, a quick-dry glue to awkwardly stick a moral onto a story that, at best, feels amoral and, at worst, seems to justify the same kind of sneaky immorality that it supposedly wants to dissect.

The aforementioned loser is Casey (Jesse Eisenberg), who's a company accountant by day and a loner with only his little dog for company by night. One of those nights, while on a trip to the grocery store, Casey is accosted by a quintet of goons on motorcycles and wearing helmets. They beat him nearly to death for no discernable reason.

After recovering in the hospital (where he overhears a news report that sums up his entire life as "a 35-year-old dog-owner," adding existential insult to physical injury), Casey now spends his days and nights alone in his home. He's given a generous leave from work, but he refuses to leave the safety of his familiar surroundings. When he finally does make a trip into town in broad daylight, Casey discovers a karate dojo.

The teacher is a man who only refers to himself and is only called Sensei (Alessandro Nivola), and Casey takes the teacher's offer of a free lesson. After experiencing the thrill of staying upright after taking a kick to the chest, he joins Sensei's class, although he hides the reason he's so interested in learning karate, lest he look weaker than he assumes everyone thinks—and says—he is.

Everything about Stearns' approach is for the goal of establishing a certain distance from the material. The characters universally speak in stilted and unnatural-sounding language, from the severe awkwardness of Casey's, well, awkward personality to the strange way that Sensei gets to the point of his lessons after some distracting filler (In telling the story of his late master's demise, he says the man died in a tragic hiking accident—of being shot in the face by a hunter who mistook him, somehow, for a bird).

The movie's sole female character of any importance is also an odd one. Anna (Imogen Poots) teaches a karate class for children that is distressingly focused on causing as much physical damage as possible (Her introduction involves her rendering a kid unconscious with a sleeper hold). The joke, of course, is that the only reason Sensei allows her into his machismo-obsessed inner circle to any degree is because of her more traditionally masculine qualities. That's the beginning and ending of the joke, and it's also more or less the end of her as a character.

Some of this is generally amusing, as Casey slowly discovers some heretofore unknown confidence, which, at first, is challenged by the rigors of the class and the world in general. The more pointed end of Stearns' satire is when that confidence finally and decidedly takes hold of Casey, who immediately becomes anti-social, self-centered, aggressive, and spontaneously violent. There's also a plot, involving a sinister conspiracy inside the dojo to take extreme measures in order to find new recruits.

That there's no middle ground in Casey's transformation is, obviously, kind of point, but it's also not the primary issue with the way Stearns presents his thesis. We get the gag in Casey's complete 180-degree turn, in the same way we can comprehend the limitations of any fanatical way of thinking: It's the "right" way or nothing else, because anything in between is "wrong."

The problem is that, in its climactic rise toward a final confrontation (and especially during and after said conflict), the movie itself falls into line with that same way of thinking. Like so much of what's presented here, The Art of Self-Defense tries to play off its final, definitive defense of violence as a joke, and unlike some of the movie, it's not especially amusing.

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