Mark Reviews Movies: VENGEANCE (2022)

Vengeance, Focus Features

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | July 28, 2022

The ambitions of Vengeance, writer/director B.J. Novak's debut feature, are broad, and that's part of the joke of the film. It revolves around an established journalist and aspiring podcaster, played by Novak (just to make the connection between the main character's goals and the filmmaker's own perfectly clear), trying to make a grand statement about the United States, political and cultural divides, and how and why people escape from their lives and reality in order to make sense of things just don't make sense to them.

Novak plays a man who may or may not genuinely care about any of this, but he definitely thinks about it, if that's any substitute. Maybe that, along with the frivolous nature of his life, is just his own way of escaping the many things he can't quite understand.

The point is that this is a smart and thoughtful film—not just about the ideas within it. It's also considered about its characters, who are so different in ways of thinking and traditions but share some sense of wanting more and a deeper emptiness that more or less keeps them running in place.

Novak's Ben Manalowitz, for example, desperately wants his "voice" out there in the world in a more significant way than the articles he writes. While he parties and contemplates his way through his life in New York City, Ben doesn't really move professionally or personally. When he arrives in Texas, he meets a lot of people with big dreams like everyone else and a view of the world that's ironically restricted by the vastness of the land where they live.

How different is that from Ben's own life, really? The people here have vague notions of becoming famous—as a singer, an actor, or a general celebrity. When those opportunities don't show up in such a place, the escape is to parties in open fields, where opiates numb the pain of regret and disappointment. We first see Ben at a party, too, although it's on a rooftop, while he and a buddy (a brief cameo from musician John Mayer) drink booze and try to figure out which anonymous woman on their cellphones might be the best company for the night.

There's an absence of genuine human connection on both of those fronts. At its core, Novak's film is about trying to break that cycle, to find those connections, and to figure out what really matters—even if that means moving toward some primal notion of darker impulses. The way it gradually and naturally moves from fish-out-of-water comedy into the murky realm of the idea of the film's title is quite impressive.

The stranger-in-a-strange-place material begins when Ben receives a phone call from Ty (Boyd Holbrook), the brother of a woman with whom the writer hooked up with once or twice. Calling from a place in Texas that's mainly defined by how many hours it is from any major city, Ty is under the impression that Ben was his sister's committed boyfriend. We're speaking in the past tense about her because she was found dead in an oil field near her hometown, apparently of an opioid overdose.

The brother convinces Ben to fly down for the funeral, and after Ben offers an uncomfortably improvised eulogy, Ty reveals to his sister's "boyfriend" that he believes she was murdered. He wants Ben to help find the real killer—or, likely, killers, because the guy has a mind for vast conspiracies involving drug cartels, government officials, and the usual real or invented targets of such theories—and get vengeance for the sister's death.

Ben doesn't believe any of it, of course, but he does see this as the perfect chance to pitch an idea for a podcast to Eloise (Issa Rae), a successful producer of such shows. He'll talk to the dead woman's family, friends, and acquaintances, as well as the police and the alleged suspects in her potential murder, and in the process, Ben hopes to uncover some evidence about his grand theory of how and why people within the country are so divided.

A few things develops—some of the obvious, a good number of them not as much. Ty and his family don't exactly fit the mold of Ben's expectations, and the scenes between the writer and the family contain some playful humor (the grandmother, played by Louanne Stephens, teaching Ben what actually happened at the Alamo, while Ben, trying to fit in, cheers too soon at a rodeo when a state university is mentioned) and genuine warmth. He bonds with Ty and the dead woman's younger brother (played by Elli Abrams Bickel), who's quietly mourning his sister's death in his own, sweetly naïve way. Meanwhile, Ashton Kutcher has a subdued but scene-stealing role as Quinten, a local record producer who amiably cuts through Ben's prejudices and gives him a better sense of perspective about everything happening in this place.

The bulk of this story is just that: Ben talking with ordinary people, those ordinary people teaching him a thing or two, and the new podcast host learning about some simpler things and discovering compassion while the investigation goes nowhere. Some moves in the third act wisely put some pragmatic edge on the family's seemingly endless politeness (It's not as if anyone's really hiding what they want out of life). Novak's screenplay is also clever in how it builds and unravels the murder mystery, even as Ben seems to dismiss it as either a lost cause or the inventions of a grieving brother.

There are answers in that regard within Vengeance. They could be as simple as who did or didn't do one thing or another on the night in question, but Novak still keeps the solution grounded in what these characters have learned and, more importantly, what they have become in the process of learning.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products