This review is based on a screening at the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival. Normal will be released in theaters on April 17.
The third team-up of Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk and John Wick writer Derek Kolstad after Ilya Naishuller’s Nobody and Timo Tjahjanto’s Nobody 2, Normal sees English genre connoisseur Ben Wheatley setting his sights on small-town America. Between the chilling dystopia of High Rise and the schlock of Meg 2: The Trench, there isn’t a storytelling mode Wheatley isn’t willing to explore, and although his latest doesn’t ultimately stick the landing, it makes for a worthwhile romp in the meantime.
The film is set in the fictitious, snow-draped Normal, Minnesota (population: 1,890), where troubled-but-kindly lawman Ulysses (Odenkirk) has taken up the temporary job of Sheriff after his predecessor’s death. Ulysses is just passing through, and he hopes his two-month stint in the folksy, frigid town will teach him something new. It’s a sleepy place with quirky characters, but a bank robbery ends up revealing surprising financial entanglements extending as far as the Yakuza. Eventually there’s all-out war on the quiet streets waged by seemingly innocuous townsfolk, forcing Ulysses to re-evaluate his allegiances, and more pertinently, find a whole lot of guns.
The latter isn’t really a problem, even though gathering the ammunition through a hail of gunfire might prove a bit of a challenge. The film spends the first half of its mere 90 minutes slowly introducing Ulysses and the audience to the people and places of Normal while establishing where he and his unlikely comrades will eventually go to arm themselves, from a general store that keeps weaponry behind lock and key, to the local bar whose walls are lined with loaded rifles, to the police station now under Ulysses’ care, which has been stocking military-style equipment ever since September 11th. “This is America,” note several characters he meets as they complain about local problems, gesturing toward the movie’s themes with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
The town, in which an armed and trigger-happy populace responds to economic anxiety with violence and fear – and in the case of Ulysses’ vengeful nonbinary compatriot Alex (Jess McLeod), by trading trans safety for political points – is Wheatley and Kolstad’s microcosm of the modern United States. It’s a place of volatility and hostility to outsiders, so it takes surprisingly few sparks for the nighttime carnage to escalate into an all-out blaze.
The town of Normal, though it has a mundane appearance, is ripe for the kind of action in which these particular artists tend to specialize. When things get going, they ramp up from zero to sixty within seconds, involving everything from grenade launchers to C-4, yielding some delightful, unapologetic carnage. Less delightful, unfortunately, is the manner in which the plot resolves itself, involving a few too many neat coincidences. However, in a place where guns are as common as streetlamps, it’s perhaps not entirely out of the question that one might go off accidentally and magically solve a major problem.
Unsatisfying though this may be from a completely visceral standpoint, some of the movie’s turns carry a symbolic weight that ends up more thematically meaningful than its lengthy shoot-em-up scenes. For instance, the town is rather efficient at cover-ups and burying bodies, and while these solutions to pressing problems conveniently resolve a lot of drama, it remains entirely in keeping with the idea of Normal as a focused metaphor for the USA, whose gun-fueled self-mythology tends to involve sweeping some unpleasantness under the rug.
Unlike his secret assassin in the Nobody films, Odenkirk’s Ulysses is, ironically, a much more mundane fellow here, but his burdens led him to try and approach the world with a steady moral compass. His attempts at uncomplicated heroism, despite his murky past, are what make him interesting. Odenkirk plays with these layers in broad but emotionally honest ways, further assisting in projecting the movie’s themes in bright, bold letters, like the idea that there can in fact be a black-and-white way forward through moral grays. And in case anything he does or says isn’t clear enough, he leaves his ex-wife plenty of expository voicemails à la Commissioner Gordon in the Batman: Year One comic book story arc.
The gloomy atmosphere Wheatley creates with the help of cinematographer Armando Salas is the pitch-perfect canvas for this type of story, not only because it enhances the ambiguity through which Ulysses is forced to cut, but because it’s pretty damn aesthetically pleasing too. Most of the action takes place in the dead of night as a snowstorm bears down, but that action is always visible and legible, and the darkness is constantly interrupted by bright, fiery explosions…which is its own kind of beautiful.
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