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| Willard |
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  (8/10)
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Runtime: 93 |
| Public Rating: 6.43 (47 votes) |
Director: Glen Morgan |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Dark Comedy |
Year: 2003 |
| Writer(s): Glen Morgan |
| Distributor: New Line |
| Reviewed by: Greg C. |
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Willard Stiles is a lonely man.
His life is horribly dull and pathetic; he has no friends to speak of, he lives with his mother who hates him, his boss keeps him around merely out of a contractual obligation with Willard’s dead father. He’s never known anything out of his daily routine, which consists of going to work (and arriving late pretty much every day), coming home and taking care of his mother, an invalid who looks like a body that deceased four years ago but forgot to let herself in on the fact, and then finally catching a few blessed moments of sleep at the crack of dawn before having to wake up and restart the process all over again an hour later. All this time, you can see in Willard’s eyes and face that there is a confident, normal person striving to get out, tell his boss off, and ask that pretty coworker of his on a date.
Unfortunately, Willard has been walked on all his life, and he is simply one of those guys who’d rather turn the other cheek than let things escalate. He’s slowly starting to crack, as years of torment for being the lonely outsider begin to seep through, and every time something happens to anger him, you can see in his eyes that there’s an internal struggle, an inability to decide if he wants to take action this time or simply roll over and let the storm pass.
The loneliness is beginning to take its toll on Willard Stiles, a loneliness that is only replaced when Willard discovers a unique ability he possess: he can talk to rats. Lots of rats. Aided by his mouse friend, Socrates, and the leader of the rats, Ben, Willard slowly begins to use his newfound abilities to get back at those who have caused him so much grief in his life.
Did I mention that this movie is one of the best dark comedies to come out of Hollywood in a long, long time?
If it doesn’t sound like a movie that would make you laugh, then that’s probably part of what makes Willard work so well.
The film struck me in a particular way, in that it took the time to linger on Willard doing little things, showing him go to the store for pest control products and becoming increasingly frustrated with the inane system the grocery has for picking out which rat poison is best for you. You don’t see that often nowadays, where most of the time you’ve got minions of Bruckheimer churning out the most flashy, gaudy and abrasive film they can for a quick buck, and to see what’s being marketed (wrongly) as a horror B-flick turn out to be fun, enjoyable, involving and thoughtful all at the same time seems to be more and more of a feat nowadays.
As a performance, Crispin Glover is firing on all pistons here, and it’s been quite a while since I’ve seen an actor have a part that seemed to be tailor made for him as much as Glover and Willard are: they mesh together so smoothly and perfectly that you’re a little unsettled by it. At the beginning of the film, you feel for Willard, or at least I did. He’s a lonely guy, who doesn’t have much to offer the world and life has dealt him a rotten hand in return. However, as the film progresses, you begin to feel creeped out about Willard, not in a Norman Bates kind of way, but there’s certain breath of uneasiness that Willard has about himself that you share right along with him. The scenes of him attempting to rid himself of the rats he once held so dear are darkly funny (rat BBQ in the basement?) yet tragic at the same time, mainly because of Willard’s relationship with the head rat, Ben.
Ben is a huge rat, and I’m not sure which was more astounding: that they’d think up an idea to make Ben a rat that was big enough to be mistaken as a small dog with an ugly tail, or that nature had already beat them to the punch. The Ben you see in the movie is a real African rat, which weighs in at around 7 pounds. The thing is huge, and surprisingly, menacing as hell. There is a sort of love/hate relationship between Willard and Ben, one that slowly becomes the backbone of the story. Ben is like a rat version of Willard; he’s different from the others and he wants Willard’s approval. However, Willard doesn’t want to accept Ben, he’s mean to him, and only finds use of him when he needs to use the rats to seek vengeance. In that way, you could sort of call Ben the protagonist for the film’s second half, but the show is Glover’s all the way, from the opening frames to the final shot.
The supporting cast fares a little differently. While there are fine performances all across the board, the only two standouts in the supporting cast is R. Lee Emery as Willard’s cruel supervisor, who channels Ernest Borgnine perfectly, and Jackie Burroughs as Willard’s spiteful mother. Laura Harring is nice as Willard’s potential love interest, but her character doesn’t ever become useful or serve a purpose. All she does is say how sorry she feels for the guy and gives him the cat that leads to one of the film’s most darkly comic moments. The rest of the cast is pretty much bit parts of a few lines of dialogue, although I got a kick out of Ms. Leech, Mr. Martin’s personal secretary who hates her boss but is still willing to slum herself for a foot massage in order to keep her job
The real star of the show here is the cinematography. It was a perfect contrast to the bleakness of The Ring, the last horror movie that I got a kick out of. There are rich browns and oranges throughout, making the film’s dark treatment of its characters even more unsettling, and therein lies the comedy, oddly enough. There are moments in Willard where the laughs are almost whimsical, and although the characters are rather unlikeable (including Willard himself at some points,) you can’t help but smile with a sort of twisted glee as you watch this loser get back at those he loathes.
I’m not too sure how Willard will play for mass audiences, because I fear that the message is being sent through the advertising that this is suppossed to be a film that will scare you and creep you out. While there is definatly some well earned creepiness from Glover’s performance, there aren’t any real jump moments, and the blood in the movie is kept for the most part suggestive and minimal. This shouldn’t deter anyone who’s simply looking for a movie that doesn’t exactly strive to be a work of art, but as a piece of entertainment, Willard is certainly the grade A cheese (excuse the bad pun.)
Rated PG-13 for violence, some disturbing images and some sexuality.
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