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The Paperboy

(2012) ** R
107 min. Millennium Films. Director: Lee Daniels. Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Nicole Kidman, John Cusack, Zac Efron, David Oyelowo, Macy Gray.

/content/films/4424/1.jpgWoe betide the family that heads down to the local movie theater, stares at the marquee, and decides The Paperboy sounds like a fun Dennis The Menace-style suburban comedy. This lurid, sexed-up pulp fiction set in and around the sultry swamps of Florida is strictly for Mom and Dad (if them).

Lee Daniels' film of Pete Dexter's 1995 novel was in development for a decade, and it's not hard to figure out why the tricky material wasn't fast-tracked. Already infamous as the movie in which Nicole Kidman pees on Zac Efron (relax: it's a jellyfish thing), The Paperboy is part legal thriller, part sex-charged coming-of-age romantic tragedy, part meditation on race, like Anatomy of a Murder, The Graduate, and Daniels' own Precious rolled into one wacked-out bloody Southern Gothic that's considerably less than the sum of those parts (just as Kidman's character doesn't quite live up to being one's "mama...high school sweetheart and an oversexed Barbie doll all rolled into one").

The title refers to Efron's character Jack Jansen, a twenty-year-old naïf who becomes gofer to his older brother Ward (Matthew McConaughey) during the summer of '69. A reporter harboring a dark personal secret of his own, Ward joins colleague Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo) in investigating the presumable wrongful conviction of lowlife death-row inmate Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack). These "paperboys" find themselves allied with Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), whose jailhouse-romance correspondence with Van Wetter means to result in an overturned sentence followed by a quickie marriage.

All of this gets put into (one) perspective by the voice-over narration of Jansen family maid Anita Chester (smoky-voiced Macy Gray), though it's anyone's guess what the otherwise self-possessed Charlotte sees in the disgustingly abusive Van Wetter ("Hillary ain't so bad, and I'm not so good," she avers). Cusack gives the film's most electric performance in the change-of-pace role, but his potency makes the journalists seem all the more clueless and/or amoral in their excusing of his wild behavior in order to serve their goal of logging a headline story.

Dexter gets co-screenwriting credit with Daniels, but this is clearly the director's show, at the expense of the source material. Daniels' plot contortions, including changing Yardley into an English-accented black man and supplying a highly unlikely (if thematically convenient) explanation for the accent. Daniels tarts up the picture with stylistic tics (split screen, slo-mo, filters), strange reveries, and period soul music, but such energies would have been better spent on organic, revelatory character work to make motivations less murky.

Despite the palpably diffuse focus, the actors labor to pull their weight; at least the bland Efron's lingering callowness suits his character, and Kidman's damaged vamp meshes well with Daniels' tonal approach. The Paperboy is perhaps better felt, or intuited, than understood on an intellectual level, though the director outlines the social forces (racism and sexism, primarily) that try the characters' souls. The Paperboy's aim is off enough to annoy: it lands, but in the bushes, with too much of the news drenched and obscured by the sprinklers.

[This review first appeared in Palo Alto Weekly.]

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Bluray

Aspect ratios: 2.35:1

Number of discs: 1

Audio: Dolby TrueHD 5.1

Street date: 1/15/2013

Distributor: Millennium Media


Millennium Media brings The Paperboy to Blu-ray in a disc that makes the most of challenging A/V material (the Blu-ray hits shelves on 1/15, the DVD following on 1/22). Shot in 16mm, the film has relatively limited visual information—in terms of sharp detail—to serve a high-def transfer, but the image here certainly retains the texture of grainy 16mm and renders accurate color and contrast. Usually, high-def shines the most in brightly-lit exteriors, and suffers under low light and in shadows, but this transfer is the exception that proves the rule, getting noisy in sunlight and better defined in low light. Befitting an indie drama, The Paperboy's Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround mix doesn't pack much power, and makes little impact in its rear channels. There's some useful ambience in the swamp sequences, but mostly the sound remains front and center, which is fine given the clarity of the primary concern: the dialogue.

The disc rounds up a handful of simple but welcome bonus features. The EPK-style "Featurette" (6:14, SD) includes glimpses of the shoot as well as interview clips of director Lee Daniels, Nicole Kidman, Matthew McConaughey, Zac Efron, Macy Gray, and producer Hilary Shor.

"Behind the Scenes" (7:03, SD) provides B-roll footage of the filming of various scenes, but primarily a jailhouse visit with Cusack's character.

"Cast and Crew Interviews" (17:49, SD) constitutes an expansion of the talking-head footage seen in the featurette.

Finally, the "Director Interview" (4:08, SD) allows Daniels to chat a bit more about the material.


Review gear:
Panasonic Viera TC-P55VT30 55" Plasma 1080p 3D HDTV
Oppo BDP-93 Universal Network 3D Blu-ray Disc Player
Denon AVR2112CI Integrated Network A/V Surround Receiver
Pioneer SP-BS41-LR Bookshelf Speaker (2)
Pioneer SP-C21 Center Speaker
Pioneer SW-8 Subwoofer

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