Mark Reviews Movies: WATERLILY JAGUAR

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 18, 2020

A rambling and unfocused melodrama about wealthy and successful people wallowing in misery, Waterlily Jaguar at least features some decent performances and an assertive vision. The movie's a mess—but almost defiantly so. It doesn't help matters, but one can appreciate the conceptualization and the thinking behind it.

The movie comes from writer/director Melora Walters, making her feature debut. It follows Bob (James Le Gros), a best-selling author who's disillusioned with his fame, popularity, and financial success. He wants to write a real book—a great work of literature—whether or not the result makes the charts. His subject is the 9,000-year-old corpse of woman, found in the La Brea Tar Pits and an apparent murder victim. Bob becomes obsessed with telling the woman's story, falling deeper into drinking and depression.

Walters' screenplay also concerns the people closest to Bob, namely his wife Helen (Mira Sorvino), his personal assistant Wilhelmina (Stacey Oristano), and his agent Bill (Dominic Monaghan). The scenes featuring those characters do get away from Bob, whose mopey and entitled attitude never makes him sympathetic.

Whether or not sympathy is Walters' aim is difficult to determine, since Bob's demeanor is a hazy brand of apathy. He spends most of the movie thinking about the dead woman or being dismissive of those closest to him. He writes the book at some point over the course of the story, although we have no sense of its significance, beyond the author's fixation.

As for the other characters, they're only slightly more developed. Wilhelmina and Bill have been having an affair for several. Bill, who's married and has children, wants something more serious, and Wilhelmina is skeptical of the idea. Helen loves Bob and wants him to get through this rough patch, and her frustration with her husband serves as the inspiration for Helen to start painting—very angrily—again.

The movie shifts between Bob's dreamy/drunken funk and the other characters, as they go through their own melodrama and learn to accept the distance Bob has put between himself and them. What's missing from Waterlily Jaguar is a clear through line for the story. As a result, scenes, as well-performed or conceptually intriguing, just seem to happen without a discernible rhyme or reason. It may be as formless as the main character's notion of himself, but with this character, that's not a positive.

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