2:37
dir: Murali K. Thalluri
It's only a matter of being utterly contrived
2:37 was the super-secret opening film at the 2006 Melbourne International Film Festival, launched to a super eager sold out crowd (in more ways than one), who would go on to create unwarranted buzz for a mediocre flick that gives after school specials a bad name. Controversy, which is always supposed to be able to sell tickets, and hysterical press releases from NGOs like the depression experts Beyond Blue, also made this flick seem more important than it really was. And now, what are we left with in the wash up, the aftermath, the hangover on the day after?
As a young director, a very young director at that, Thalluri manages not only to cobble together a Frankenstein-style script from other marginally better movies, but also manages to get crap performances from most of the actors playing ciphers instead of characters throughout the movie. Practically none of the characters, who are given a selection of clichés to work down to, seem to exist as anything apart from mannequins.
Thalluri lifts wholesale the aesthetic and structure from Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which was another excruciating film loosely based around the Columbine high school shootings with a fractured narrative, with multiple visual and thematic clues. He also lifts a major element from the Roger Avery film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ Rules of Attraction, which I can’t mention because it would spoil the whole dire setup.
On top of that he wedges in a year’s worth of Degrassi Junior High episodes with every teen issue you can imagine: homophobia, gay students both in and out of the closet, drug use, pregnancy, incest, rape, eating disorders, bladder disorders, overachievers, loneliness and depression. All happening in the course of one day.
The framing device used to tell the story is that the movie begins with the indication that someone at this school, has killed themselves. It then goes back in time and introduces us to a bunch of archetypes that don’t deserve to be called characters, with the understanding being that one of them is the kid who committed suicide. As each of them meanders along, and is given a shitload of reasons why they might off themselves, we’re supposed to guess which one will do it.
As well, interrupting the story, are these black and white interviews to camera where the students talk a bit more about themselves. As artificial and cliché as the acting is in the main bit, the delivery of lines here to camera is often excruciating. The very use of these ‘interviews’ indicates to me that the makers knew there wasn’t enough substance to the portrayals within the ‘main’ storyline, and they needed an artificial contrivance to try and balance that out. It doesn’t work, is distracting, and further emphasises how false the whole production is. There’s also no explanation as to why they’re talking to camera, which makes it even more irritating.
The characters themselves are types: there’s the popular moron jock with a terrible secret (Sam Harris), the overachieving arsehole with a terrible secret (Frank Sweet), the stoner who’s also out of the closet (Joel Mackenzie), the bulimic vapid airhead (Marni Spillane), the pale girl with a terrible secret (Teresa Palmer), and the disabled guy with not only one leg shorter than the other, but a bladder problem as well (Charles Baird). All of them show glimmers of genuine talent and ability, and I wish them well in their acting careers. What I pray that they don’t act in another film by this director, because their abilities are drowned under the weight of a bad script and a director who doesn’t know how to direct actors.
Some of the characters just glide past, some of them are actively irritating, but some of them irritate more for their existence rather than how they’re portrayed. The numpty character, who’s nonetheless well acted, is annoying because he’s such a stock-standard construction. Doubling up on infirmities with him as the almost ‘disabled’ student is meant to show how unthinkingly cruel students can be when they all torment him. The bladder thing is just needlessly overdone, and doesn’t ring true for a second.
Everyone else keeps getting these moments, as the flick progresses, where at the end of it you’re meant to ask yourself, “Is this the event that tips them over the edge? Are they the one that kills themselves?” For such a reaction to have meaning, I would have had to have cared for any of them. But, since none of them seemed real, it was a bit of a struggle.
About the only thing that comes across really well is the message that everyone has their own problems to deal with, life is hard, we’re often too caught up in our own shit to be able to see the people around us crying out for help, and the indications that someone may need help and be susceptible to the siren’s call of suicide are not always obvious. It’s a theme I can understand and relate to. Suicide is a terrible, terrible reality for many of us, and, as someone who has lost a friend via suicide, I am incapable of treating the subject lightly.
It doesn’t make any of the other crap any easier to swallow, though. I had no problem with the structure or editing, which often doubles back to show the same scene from someone else’s perspective, it’s just that many of these occasions didn’t warrant showing once, let along twice. And the manner in which ‘serious’ dramatic scenes would have this piano-laden score appear out of nowhere to tell us “this is a serious scene, you bastards”, deeply, deeply irritated me.
Some scenes, like students arguing in class about the prospect of same-sex couples adopting children, ring true, because the students are as brutally honest and ‘unreconstructed’ in their opinions as high school students actually are. The film can’t be accused of having a scintilla of political correctness, which is a good thing. But other pointless scenes, like the stoner student getting stoned in the janitor’s closet and tripping out whilst mumbling inanities were just stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.
The actual suicide, as depicted, which led to the main controversy in the media, and politicians and Beyond Blue getting involved, is… problematic. I have problems with it, though I can’t accuse the makers of glamourising or romanticising the act itself. It is ugly, as it should be, but it is done in a way that stylises all the same, and turns it into something that I don’t think the makers intended. It also goes on and on unnecessarily. But there is something shocking and deeply unsettling about it.
Other scenes like the depiction of rape and the ‘issues’ between a brother and sister are terribly mishandled. Badly thought out and badly portrayed, and I can’t blame the actors for that. It’s nasty for the sake of being nasty, pointlessly courting controversy in an already controversial film.
It feels so removed from the lives of actual high school students, with its mawkish high seriousness and level of contrivance, but maybe I’m not one to judge. Perhaps teenagers are the perfect audience for this film and could relate to the characters more than I could, since I’m pretty distant from my teenage years. I do remember the horrors and highpoints of high school, and the boredom, but I don’t remember it being as artificial as this.
Although I do have this lingering sadness over what happened to me at the senior prom, when they tricked me into thinking I was going to be crowned prom queen, but they poured pig’s blood on me instead, and I used my psychic powers to kill everyone…
Ah, those were the days.
Maybe there’s a good film lurking under the surface, and I just can’t see it. At the very least all I can say is that Thalluri has proved vastly better at hyping himself and his movie than he has at directing. And the subsequent revelation that the person he dedicates the film to, a friend called ‘Kelly’ whose suicide compelled him to tell this story, who has proved to be a complete fabrication, doesn’t endear me towards the film or the director much either.
Still, he could always impress me down the track with something better. But definitely not with 2:37; a film so fake it makes the outpouring of grief at the death of Anna Nicole Smith seem genuine.
4 times the point of the film surely wasn’t to make me hope that most of the characters would commit suicide out of 10
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“Pretty confident, aren’t ya, making fun of me in front of ya mates?” – 2:37
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