Mark Reviews Movies: TUSCALOOSA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 12, 2020

Writer/director Philip Harder wants to say so much with Tuscaloosa that the movie ends up saying nothing at all. It's a strange drama, based on W. Glasgow Phillips novel, about an aimless young man, the mentally ill woman with whom he falls in love, and racial tensions in a small Alabama city that erupt into violence. Narratively, the movie is all over the place, and as a result, it's dramatically shallow.

The aimless man is Billy (Devon Bostick), who, in 1972, lives and works at a mental asylum run by his doctor father (Tate Donovan). Billy is a bit of a rebel—but only a bit of one. He treats his father with dismissive contempt, is up in the air about going to Vietnam, and smokes weed with his friend Nigel (Marchánt Davis), a young black man who runs a barbecue stand down the road.

Billy and Nigel were better friends growing up, but then their romantically involved mothers ran off together. The assumption is that they were murdered, and Nigel has become convinced that the doctor was involved. None of that, weirdly, really matters, despite some flashbacks two decades earlier to the two women in a car, where they keep looking over their shoulders for the inevitable.

The bulk of the story is devoted to Billy and Virginia (Natalia Dyer), who recently has been institutionalized. Billy is immediately infatuated with her, and she wants him to help her escape. Instead, they go out fishing at night, and it becomes increasingly obvious that Virginia's story of false institutionalization might not be entirely accurate.

None of this, actually, really matters in the end. The relationship between Billy and Virginia becomes a trite story about love overcoming the odds. Virginia's real problems are kept a mystery until it's too late to do anything with them, and Nigel refuses to call Billy a friend unless he becomes more involved in fighting racism (a point he has to repeatedly make, which kind of defeats the ultimatum). There's a subplot about Nigel's involvement in attacks on the establishment that really put Billy's indecisive, apathetic nature in sharp focus.

To put it bluntly, he's a self-involved bore. While Tuscaloosa is about Billy finally coming to some sort of decision about what's important to him, the very fact that it's only "some sort of decision" is a dreadfully low bar for drama.

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