CW/TW: Suicide, throughout

On a recent episode of the Lagniappe podcast, I mentioned that I had recently watched the abysmal 2000 Cersei Lannister/Norman Reedus vehicle Gossip, which couldn’t even be saved by an appearance from Edward James Olmos and starrings role by two of my sweetest baboos, James Marsden and Joshua Jackson. Luckily, it wasn’t long before I found a more entertaining (if not technically better) tonal analog that fit the bill for trashy-chic urban-legend dark comedy in 1998’s The Curve, playing on a Tubi near you! 

Chris (Michael Vartan) is the token scholarship kid among his friends at a prestigious Ivy League feeder college. He’s working harder with less while his two upper class roommates—utter asshole Rand (Randall Batinkoff) and unmedicated manic pixie nightmare twink Tim (Matthew Lillard)—are able to largely skate by in their courses. Chris needs a 4.0 to qualify not just for entry to Harvard Med but the funding needed to attend, and there’s a B+ in one of his classes that might be the deciding factor in whether or not he moves on to his next academic waypoint for levelling up or faces an unknown fate. When he’s unable to change his grade through cheating or hacking, Tim comes up with a way to make sure that Chris gets the grade; as it turns out, it’s university policy to offer any student whose roommate commits suicide a 4.0 for the semester. Chris balks at this idea at first, but when he witnesses some truly awful behavior from Rand, including verbally abusing and embarrassing his girlfriend Nicole (Tamara Craig Thomas) at a party in front of dozens of people when she was just trying to get him alone to tell him that she was pregnant, he commits. After all, at this point, they’ve already laid the groundwork by gathering material that would lead investigators to no other conclusion than suicide, including Joy Division CDs, Poe novels, and a copy of The Bell Jar, and by planting the idea that he’s been acting differently lately in the mind of Chris’s girlfriend Emma (Keri Russell). Things get more complicated, however, when Rand’s body can’t be found, but Natalie’s is discovered, leading everyone involved to question who they trust, who they believe, and whether they can escape the tangled web they’ve woven alive and free. 

This one was not well received in its time, but I am once again here to tell you that I’ve unearthed another latter day 90s gem that deserves critical re-evaluation. For one thing, the soundtrack is a lot of fun, with original score composition by Shark and rounded out by The Smiths and a catalog of oh-so-1998-tracks by the likes of Unwritten Law, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Aimee Mann, Bauhaus, and, perfectly enough, The Belljars. The number of twists that unveil themselves as the film goes along are successively less believable but exponentially more fun, as the litany of who’s scamming whom, who’s in cahoots with whom, and who really hates whom layers upon itself to the point of absurdity. The real magic here, as it often is, is Lillard, who is absolutely devouring the scenery. Playing on his Stu Macher screwball energy, he’s using it to a much more malicious effect, and not only is it more threatening than one would expect, it’s also hornier, which contributes a lot to the fun factor for me. In one scene, Lillard’s Tim tricks another character into seeing him getting intimate with said character’s girlfriend, and as his body glistens in the candlelight and the camera dollies in on his smug, red-lit face, it’s truly both menacing and magnetic. The other actors are all competent here; Batinkoff isn’t asked to stretch his acting muscles much, nor is Thomas asked to do more than cry and complain, and Russell is, uncharacteristically, a virtual non-entity, phoning it in. Vartan could stand to loosen up a little on camera; he should be the Robert Redford type, a man caught in a conspiracy and trying to get out of it with an everyman charm instead of a James Bondian wit, but instead he’s very stiff and wooden, especially against Lillard’s lithe serpentine business. 

This isn’t a great movie, but it is a fun one, and the perfect thing to put on in the background while you pack for your summer vacation, while visions of Lillard’s threatening abs dance in your dreams.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond