"Vengeance" - Film Review
Vengeance, a true crime-esque murder mystery, opens with a dead body being dragged across barren Texas oil fields as Toby Keith’s “Red Solo Cup” lets the audience know exactly what they’re getting themselves in for. Something slightly askew, but with a darkness beneath. The film then cuts to John Mayer (as himself) and Ben (BJ Novak) on a rooftop in Brooklyn having an inane conversation about their dating lives. This duality is one of the film’s greatest strengths, a balance of humor, heart, and pain.
“Not every white guy in New York needs to have a podcast,” warns Eloise (Issa Rae). That doesn’t deter Ben in the slightest, and he continues to search for the perfect topic. In the middle of the night, Ben gets a phone call from a man in Texas saying that Ben’s girlfriend has died. It’s a bit of a shock for Ben because he has no idea what this man is talking about. As it turns out, Abilene Shaw (Lio Tipton), a woman he had a fling with, was killed in Texas. When Abilene’s brother, Ty (Boyd Holbrook), says he believes foul play was involved, Ben sees this as his big break.
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Ben is overly confident as he begins the podcast. He thinks his fancy New York job and his nights out in SoHo House make him inherently better than the people of Texas. He writes for New York Magazine The New Yorker, he’s been a panelist for SXSW, and he hangs out with John Mayer, so he’s important. Of course, he’s wrong, very wrong, but it’s important to see him come to that realization on his own. The perfect example of this is Ben explaining Chekhov's gun to Abilene’s sister, Paris (Isabella Amara). She stops him midway through and says it doesn’t make sense because she can’t think of a Chekhov play that has a gun. Ben admits that he doesn’t actually know any of Chekhov’s plays, he just knows the theory.
“This is about a new American reality that people can't accept. So instead they invent these myths and conspiracies so they can cast themselves as the heroes,” Ben says to Eloise as part of his pitch for a podcast. At the beginning of the film, Ben doesn’t realize how much that statement applies to him as well. In reality, he’s inserted himself into a family that is hurting because he thinks he can play the hero. Maybe hero isn’t the right word for what Ben does. He’s more a self-righteous, pseudo-intellectual who thinks he can solve the problems of lesser people.
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What makes Vengeance a truly intriguing debut for writer/director Novak is how firmly the film sticks the ending. A twist in the third act sends the story careening over the dusty oil fields to the climax in a way that is both absurd and logical. The story is as big and wide as the Texas sky it takes place under. The film twists around itself to make grand statements about the current state of America, then argues that Whataburger is the best fast food restaurant in the country. Not only that, but Vengeance somehow uses Whataburger to genuinely explain what love is more succinctly than one could imagine.
Vengeance is a fish-out-of-water murder mystery. Novak’s script is careful to make sure the joke isn’t on the Shaw family, and focuses more on Ben’s preconceived notions. He arrives in Texas thinking he has everyone and everything already figured out, but he barely knows himself. The story he leaves with is not the one he went to Texas to find. Nothing about his trip goes as expected, but that’s just life.
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Ben’s initial pitch to Eloise is about time, and how technology has created an era in which time is meaningless. We take pictures of the present for our future selves, rather than living in the moment. Phone conversations can span hours and days and take the place of in-person, face-to-face talks. Ben can meet a girl in real life named Abilene, but only get to know her in the videos she leaves behind. Vengeance, more than anything, is a plea for life to have meaning without being distilled into content generation. It’s a plea for presentness, a willingness to embrace regrets, and a promise to do better.
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