REVERSE THE CURSE - Mark Reviews Movies

Reverse the Curse, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 13, 2024

Trying to get at some harsh truths about a troubled father-son relationship and dying and cost of obsession, Reverse the Curse is simply too gimmicky to be frank and honest about any of those subjects or, for that matter, the several others writer/director David Duchovny brings up here. It's not just gimmicky in one particular way, either. The movie is as changing in its approach as it is shallow in its characters and its exploration of themes.

It starts, for example, with Ted (Logan Marshall-Green), a struggling author who makes a living as a peanut vendor at Yankee Stadium. He has completed 12 novels, and not one of them has been published. A representative (played by Pamela Adlon) at a publishing house suggests that Ted's problem is that he has never really had any significant life experiences or suffered, which comes as a bit of a surprise later when we learn just how much the guy has gone through in his life.

The writer angle of the character and story doesn't matter, ultimately, because the actual story revolves around Ted moving back in his father Marty (Duchovny). Marty has terminal lung cancer, has decided against treatment, attempted suicide, and is heading back to an empty house with no one to care for him. The man's a character, to be sure, in that Duchovny, adapting his own novel, writes and plays him to be everything and anything the story requires him to be at any given moment. He's a miserable SOB, of course—emotionally distant, unsupportive, continually insulting his son, casually racist.

That last part, apparently, is fine, because the only time that characteristic reveals itself is with his nurse/death coach Mariana (Stephanie Beatriz). Using an ethnic slur in talking about her, Marty explains that it's fine, because the two are friends. Mariana agrees, because she's also the sort of character who exists solely to fit the requirements of the story Duchovny wants to tell. Inevitably, Ted and she start flirting, getting closer, and, ultimately, becoming romantic, and it's telling that Mariana doesn't seem to have a life outside of these two characters, while a hidden past eventually comes to light exclusively for the purpose of Ted proving that he cares about her.

Let's get back to Marty, though, who's all those terrible things but also just a big, pained, and regretful softy beneath it all. That idea comes later, of course, as Ted spends more time with his father and participates in assorted schemes and adventures for his benefit, and the way the character flips for some kind of catharsis in the relationship gets at the central problem with him. If Marty is just what the story needs him to be, he's basically nothing at all, except a storytelling device.

There are plenty of others here, too. The big one is baseball. The movie is set in 1978, when the Yankees, Ted's team and the favorite of most people living in Marty's small New Jersey town, and the Boston Red Sox, Marty's preferred club, are continuing a long-standing rivalry that actually seems to be going in the underdog Boston squad's direction. Ted learns that Marty's health seems to improve when his team is winning, so he devises an elaborate ruse to convince his dad that Boston is doing better than they actually are as the season progresses.

That's one of the story's gimmicks. Another has Ted reading a book his father wrote, about a man who starts an affair with a woman, only to discover that the tale is based on Marty's life. That sends Ted and Mariana on a search for the woman, which is odd both because of how much Ted resents how distant his father has been his entire life (The affair, Marty explains in some armchair analysis, is what got him to become obsessed with baseball, which we first see as a reason for the father ignoring his son as a kid) and as a way to bring Ted and Mariana closer. Obviously, Ted's character alters as much as the others here, just as the tone keeps mutating on a whim.

It almost seems as if the movie is afraid to be sincere, which might explain why so much of it tries to be funny—especially around any scene that does cut deeper into the difficult father-son relationship. Like the father character, Reverse the Curse seems intent and content on keeping a severe degree of emotional remove, which might also explain why the third act becomes a clichéd road trip. That attitude, though, is definitely exemplified by a farting competition being sandwiched between a pair of attempted emotional payoffs.

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