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Willard can't even interest the rodents
by Joe Tarr
Whenever people start talking about their family, workplace or clique of friends being made into a sitcom, the inevitable question floats around: whom would you want to play you?
I always have the same answer—Crispin Glover. It's not that I fancy Glover resembles me or that our personalities are similar. He's not even a particularly good actor. But, what I like about him is that he's weird. He plays the kind of character that leaves an audience baffled as they scratch their heads and wonder just what the hell it is they are watching.
I'm weird too, but not in the way that Glover is. But if anybody is going to portray me on the tube or screen, I want him to show me as a riddle, a question left unanswered. And that is Glover's specialty.
He got his start playing good-natured but geeky characters like George McFly in 1985's Back To The Future. But his roles grew increasingly weird and off-key, until it seemed like he could only score cameos in his friends' films. Glover even managed the trick of out-weirding every single character in one of uber-weirdo David Lynch's films, Wild At Heart. (The scene of him filling his underpants with cockroaches is one of the most bizarre non-sequiturs I've seen on film.)
Of late, Glover has taken bigger roles that try to capitalize on his intense strangeness, including two literary characters, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and the lead role in Bartleby.
So it would seem like Glover would be a perfect choice to star in the remake of the creepy 1971 cult hit, Willard.
Willard is a shy misfit. He is badgered at home by an overbearing and disappointed mother and tormented at work by a boss, Frank Martin, who stole the company Willard's late father founded.
When Willard discovers rats infesting his basement, he makes a few half-hearted attempts to kill them. But, soon he turns to them for companionship. As he feeds them, their numbers multiply. Two rats in particular gain his attention, a good-natured white one he names Socrates, and a scheming giant brown one he calls Ben.
As his home and work life gets more unbearable, Willard discovers that the rats will follow his orders and he soon starts dreaming of ways he can get revenge on the boss.
Glover does a decent job of playing Willard, careful to show restraint. He doesn't have to tell us that there's a madness roiling inside him.
But the movie fails because there is nothing else there for Glover to work his weirdness against. The world of the film is devoid of much of anything. There are essentially only three other human characters in the film, and none of them are given much to do or say.
The boss, played by R. Lee Ermey, and the mother, Jackie Burroughs, are mere caricatures. Laura Elena Harring plays a sympathetic co-worker, but she remains too far in the background to register.
Even the settings—the '70s-era office and warehouse; the musty, dark basement with old paint cans and dark dusty corners; the hardware store—have more detail and character than the people we see. Perhaps this emptiness is intentional in trying to convey Willard's emotionally devoid world, but it makes it hard to sympathize with anyone or give a damn about what will happen.
With no people to work against, Glover is left to interact with rats. And although some of these rats are talented actors, it's too much to ask them to sustain our attention for a full-length feature. At times they seem equally baffled by Willard's behavior, as they sniff their tiny noses at him.
It's a bit unsettling seeing hundreds of rodents scurrying around Willard's home. But nothing in this movie is really all that scary. We don't even root against the rats, except during one grisly scene with a cat. At the end, it's the rats that seem to judge Willard the most, and it's their judgment that troubles him more than anything.
Without any fleshed-out characters surrounding him, Glover just comes off as simple and predictable in Willard, his brilliant weirdness stripped of its power.
Glover works best in movies where he doesn't quite fit or can play an anxious, unpredictable menace. In those roles, he subverts the movie and teases the audience, as though he's saying, "pay attention, something is happening." When those moments arrive, it can be something like art. Willard is just boring.
He can still play me though, if he wants.
March 20, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 12
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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