Saint John of Las Vegas
Dir: Hue Rhodes
Rating: 3.0/5.0
IndieVest Pictures
85 Minutes
Writer/director Hue Rhodes' new film, Saint John of Las Vegas, has a lot going for it: a legendarily reliable star as the titular John (Steve Buscemi), a cast of ringers, an oddball sense of humor bordering on the surreal and not least, a plot very loosely cribbed from Dante's Inferno. In addition to all that, Rhodes borrows much of the Coen Brothers' aesthetic of low key, almost maddening tension in the midst of nowhere, but doesn't manage to quite make it click in the way in which films of theirs do.
Claims adjuster John Alegheri (that's only a step away from Alighieri, if you feel like trying to find the parallels) lives a quiet life of small irritations in New Mexico, his semi-hidden past as a compulsive Las Vegas gambler only apparent in his massive consumption of scratch-it lotto cards. He flirts ineptly with his unnervingly chipper cubicle-mate, Jill (Sarah Silverman), and muses over his former life as a high roller. Whatever unpleasantness drove him away from Sin City isn't revealed in full detail, but his narrated "My name is John, and I used to be lucky" pretty much fills us in. When his employer (Peter Dinklage) partners him up with a curt fraud investigator named Virgil (Romany Malco) to debunk a $200k auto accident claim, John is carried into a vaguely allegorical descent with a kind of hapless, frustrated good-naturedness. I won't spoil any further episodes, except to say it involves wheelchair strippers, full frontal male nudity, gambling and a man who bursts into flame every few seconds.
Saint John is never boring as a film, but it's also a slowly paced, frequently frustrating one. If it's an attempt to create viewer empathy with John's own plight, then it's a noble one, but isn't really necessary. Buscemi's own hangdog expression does that well enough; combined with the washed-out lighting and his own deadpan narration, he comes off as both deeply flawed and likable. An intermittent flash-forward and a recurring slow motion dream sequence are also never quite successful; it actually took me the majority of the film to realize that it was a flash-forward instead of back. It's also a pity that the enormous skills of Peter Dinklage are used so little. His character drops out of the film for far too long; the few scenes he does have are hilariously abrasive. Silverman also is underutilized, although her usual a-little-too-wide grin adds a nice touch to a character whose primary characteristic is collecting smiley faces. Malco is much finer as Virgil, playing the investigator/spiritual guide as a mass of irritation and chain smoking.
Rhodes certainly has a lot to be proud of with Saint John. It's amusing, engrossing and ends with a note of optimism leavened with a strange lack of growth. But it does reach far without making use of all that it already has on the table. It's important to utilize every inch when you're stretching out.
by Nathan Kamal
