No Such Thing
dir. Hal Hartley
United Artists

You would think No Such Thing could at least lay claim to being the best film to feature Iceland in the past year, but it looks like that honor belongs to the indie success 101 Reykjavik. While No Such Thing serves as a polished tourist advertisement for that large rock Americans normally fly past on their way to Europe, the question remains: "But is it art?" Unfortunately, it is.

Director Hal Hartley has a history of producing inscrutable work, and No Such Thing — set to be his first major commercial release — will only bolster that reputation. On the face of it, though, this is unpromising material. A takeoff on the old Hollywood monster movie, brought up to date and turned into a savage parody of America's celebrity-stricken, thrill-kill media culture? Well, all right. If Helen Mirren and Julie Christie liked the script, how bad can it be? But it is bad, and while Hartley often hints that he's baiting us with sheer ridiculousness, that doesn't exactly make it a masterpiece of irony.

The film's heroine, Beatrice (Sarah Polley), begins as a starry-eyed intern at a New York media conglomerate, feeding tabloid television to the Americans of a not-too-remote dystopian future. The economy is collapsing, the president is suicidal, terrorist bombs are exploding across the country and religious fanatics are pumping poison gas into the city's subways. As parody this falls flat, and not because it's in poor taste: Life during wartime just turns out not to be so bleak, even in Manhattan. Mirren rescues the newsroom scenes with her star turn as Beatrice's boss, a satanic Wintour-like figure in platinum blonde.

Reports of a homicidal monster in back-country Iceland should appeal to Beatrice's jaded employers — all the more so when a company film crew vanishes on an expedition to track the creature down. Since one of the cameramen is (or was) Beatrice's fiancé, she volunteers to chase an anonymous tip hinting at their whereabouts. After some opaque stage business involving a drug addict, a flight rerouting and spinal surgery without anesthesia, she arrives in Iceland, and with the help of a sympathetic doctor (Christie) eventually makes her way to the Monster's lair.

Robert John Burke has his work cut out for him as an ageless, fire-breathing, nearly indestructible entity whose makeup job makes him look like a somewhat bedraggled Klingon. Instead of chewing off Beatrice's head, the Monster takes a chance and confides in her. The evolution of the human race has annoyed him so much that he's retreated to this desolate corner of the planet, swilling whiskey and occasionally venturing out to terrorize the nearest village. Death alone can end his agony, but there's a catch: the Monster is impervious to bullets and almost everything else. Only one human scientist has discovered how to destroy him. Can Beatrice help him track down the eccentric, possibly insane Dr. Artaud?

By the time those with a palate for such things have digested this thuddingly unsubtle allusion — to Antonin Artaud, the inter-war French dramatist who invented the "Theater of Cruelty" — the film returns us to New York, where it segues back into uncertain satire. Hartley stuffs the second half of the picture with so many new loose ends we almost forget the ones that came earlier. It's not hard to guess, for example, that our heroine takes her name from the much earlier Beatrice who served as Dante's muse. But how does this help explain her bizarre personality change after she brings the Monster back to Manhattan? As for Dr. Artaud (amusingly played by Baltasar Kormákur of 101 Reykjavik), his main dramatic function seems to be an odd little soliloquy that casts doubt on everything we've been told about the Monster's origins.

If it's any consolation, Antonin Artaud didn't believe in making things easy either. In one of his best-known aphorisms, he declared that his idea of good theater was firing a loaded revolver at random into the audience. That quip nicely captures the strengths and weaknesses of No Such Thing. It's not often that we get a high-budget motion picture written with the precious, "experimental" sensibility of an off-off-Broadway play … but if great art has to hurt, this film must not be quite painful enough.

— Jeff Rigsby (jeff_rigsby at hotmail dot com)