Downloading Nancy
Dir: Johan Renck
Rating: 1.5
Strand Releasing
102 Minutes
In theory, there’s a lot to care about in Downloading Nancy. It’s a twisted indie drama about a depressed housewife who hires a man from the Internet to kill her, but ends up entering into a sado-masochistic relationship with him instead. It’s an intriguing premise and shows just what an indie film should be: cinema that tackles themes and subjects major studios simply won’t touch until it becomes en vogue because of the indie films that paved the way to begin with. However, there’s something about Downloading Nancy that not only fails to resonate, but also utterly fails to even drum up interest in what’s happening on screen.
Maria Bello plays the eponymous Nancy, an inconsolable woman whose existence craves for those who love her to hurt her. She’s fragile, broken, yet capable of violent, unsettling outbursts when she doesn’t get the pain she needs. Bello creates a disturbing center for everyone else in the film to react to. Too bad the people reacting to her are Rufus Sewell and Jason Patric. Sewell is that bland English actor who seems like he resembles another actor, but doesn’t — a brand of generality that worked so well in Dark City because the plot involved alien beings turning humanity into glorified dress-up dolls with interchangeable personalities. In Downloading Nancy this lack of charisma just makes him dreadfully boring. Jason Patric is Jason Patric, whose only bit of notability is that he was ill-fitted to replace Keanu Reeves in Speed 2: Cruise Control. He portrays Nancy’s sadistic lover like a serial killer — a bit too broad and obvious for something that should be more nuanced and challenging.
The script is the sort that doesn’t initially let on what’s happening in the film. I like that method of storytelling, as it lets the audience figure out things for itself rather than through spoon-fed exposition. For this to work, however, you have to make the audience interested in finding out more. This is hard when we’re meant to identify with Nancy’s husband, Albert (Sewell), who is detached and emotionally distant. We could potentially appreciate the sadistic Louis (Patric), who gives Nancy what she desires even though what she wants is violence and pain, forcing us to question the morality of infidelity in extremis, but he just ends up being creepy.
If that weren’t misguided enough, the script is peppered with weird bits of indie comedy quirk: Nancy and Louis at an arcade watching a ponytailed guy play Dance Dance Revolution, Nancy’s husband attempting to open an indoor putting range franchise, a joke about the two kinds of dog food you can find in Thailand (the punch line is exactly what you think). Why is there such quirkiness in a depressing drama? Did we need an awkward moment of levity between watching a blindfolded woman being forced to step on mousetraps and watching a man somberly pace around his house?
Johan Renck’s direction is surprisingly restrained, mundane, and un-flashy for being the work of a guy who cut his teeth doing music videos for Madonna and New Order. It helps that he’s enlisted the brilliant Christopher Doyle to shoot the film, but unfortunately Doyle’s resigned to render the entire thing in a muted palette of depressing blues and grays because Downloading Nancy takes place in the part of America that’s in Scandinavia. This is the most effective part of the film, as it creates an oppressively dour atmosphere, but why was the cinematographer whose visual expertise defined such films as Hero and the best Wong Kar-Wai films forced to shoot Jason Patric falling over as he tries to throw a chair across the room (yes, I rewatched that moment like 30 times, and yes I’m a bad critic)? At best, the cinematographic atmosphere is a crutch for the failings of the script and most of the actors: I don’t get depressed thinking about what happens in the film. I get depressed looking at it.
Downloading Nancy is not ill-conceived, just poorly executed. What would it take to make us care about any of this? Humanizing Albert seems to be the key. It would go something like this: A year after the events in the film, Albert (a distraught, repentant widower) prints out e-mails from Nancy to Louis. Reading the messages leads to further investigation wherein Albert finds out a side of his wife that he never even knew existed (hence the title). We find out through e-mails and flashbacks that Albert was detached and emotionally distant, and that Louis satisfied her in ways (albeit objectionable) that the straight-laced Albert never could. Albert tries to reconcile that while we negotiate the fact that Nancy was happier walking on mousetraps placed by Louis than remaining unharmed at an uncomfortably quiet dinner table with Albert. We explore the politics and morality of relationships and put Christopher Doyle’s camera to proper use.
But the film is nothing like that. Downloading Nancy, while grasping at some of the above things, ultimately ends up a series of emotionally distant, irrelevant scenes that plod and plod until we fade to black and the final card reveals to us that it was — gasp! — “based on true events.” Oh, so that’s why we should care.
by Danny Djeljosevic
