Chumscrubber
Studio: Newmarket FIlms
Rated: R
Website: http://www.chumscrubber.com/
Release Date: 2005-08-05
Cast: Jamie Bell, Camilla Belle, Justin Chatwin, Glenn Close, Rory Culkin
Director: Arie Posin
Screenwriter: Zac Stanford
Music Score: James Horner
WorkNameSort: Chumscrubber
Our Rating: 3.00
How soon you need to see The Chumscrubber has less to do with the film’s genuine merits than your eagerness to witness the flowering of a new subgenre: the post-Donnie Darko metaphysical teen-angst picture.
Make no mistake, Chumscrubber is Darko redux, albeit seen through a suburban gauze that’s straight out of Desperate Housewives. Set in a squeaky-scrubbed community of cul-de-sacs that looks to be somewhere in the vicinity of Wisteria Lane (and comes complete with narration from the great beyond), the movie stares into the moral abyss that’s rearing up to meet a disaffected teen named Dean Stiffle (Jamie Bell, the onetime Billy Elliot).
At the movie’s outset, Dean loses his de facto best friend to suicide. The tragedy sends immediate shock waves through their high school: It seems the dead kid was the biggest dope dealer on campus, and his surviving clients presume that the responsibility of surrendering his remaining inventory logically falls to poor old Dean. To force his hand, a pair of suspiciously clean-cut toughs kidnaps an underclassman they think is Dean’s younger brother; he’s actually a good deal more well-connected, and the resultant comedy of (grave) errors – which goes on right under the noses of clueless parents and other authority figures – illustrates the kids’ remove from their adult guardians. (In the movie’s best running gag, the warring youngsters are able to talk their way into all manner of clandestine negotiation sessions merely by tossing off the placating mantra, “It’s for school.”)
The grown-ups are an inattentive bunch, all right. Dean’s dad (William Fichtner) is an egocentric author fixated on flooding the nation’s bookshelves with fuzzy-headed self-help manuals, while his mom (Allison Janney) channels her energies into hawking vitamin supplements. The suicide case’s mother (Glenn Close) wanders around the neighborhood in a beatific daze, assuring all and sundry that she doesn’t blame any of them for her boy’s death. The closest thing to real gumption she can manage is a parking dispute with the mother (Rita Wilson) of the kidnap victim, who has inconsiderately scheduled her wedding to the town’s unhinged mayor (Ralph Fiennes) for the same day as the deceased youth’s memorial service.
Everybody in the film who’s over the age of 21 is zonked out on medication, materialism or good old narcissism. Witness the silly state of competition that exists between a bikini-wearing MILF (Carrie-Anne Moss) and her good/bad-girl daughter, Crystal – as in meth, I suppose, and played by Camilla Belle, whose resolute hotness does nothing to absolve the movie from charges of prurience.
Indeed, the film sometimes seems like a case study in taking advantage. Where Donnie Darko sustained the appearance of being on its youthful protagonists’ side, The Chumscrubber pokes its squirming antiheroes with a stick to see how much box-office viability their alienation might yield. The slick but discomfiting result reminds us that intent and sincerity are what separate the great films from the merely good ones, no matter how many surface similarities they may boast. The Chumscrubber, for instance, is named after a ghoulish video game that pervades its young characters’ lives – and which, as an organizing element, performs the exact same function as Darko‘s human-sized rabbit. (The two movies also share a recurring airplane motif.)
What we’re seeing here is the commoditization of teen trauma. The end product might be entirely dismissible were the movie out-and-out inept, but it’s always at least professional. The performances are almost uniformly fine, even when the casting is somewhat suspect. (Justin Chatwin, as alluded to earlier, makes one reputable-looking hooligan.) Neither is the story predictable, exactly: No matter how much of it is borrowed, you can seldom tell what’s going to happen next. At times, that’s because first-time feature filmmaker Arie Posin stoops to holding our interest with sudden grisliness that’s shockingly at odds with the movie’s otherwise snarky, satirical tone. There’s nothing he won’t put a kid through for kicks; that the same could be said of the society he’s lampooning raises a host of questions about this emergent school of suburban-jungle cinema. Somewhere, an all-knowing bunny is looking on in great interest; but from this distance, it’s hard to tell if he’s smiling or shaking his head in bemusement.
This article appears in Aug 3-9, 2005.