Review of Stuck (2002) by Jack G — 15 Nov 2009

Stuck is based on a true story, and it's one that you may have heard of; it's the kind of tall tale of bizarre crime that, as happens, inspired an episode of Law & Order. A woman one night hits a homeless guy, and instead of reporting it to the cops and ambulance keeps the homeless guy in her garage, since the man doesn't have the status to really have anyone worry about him. Then a few days later- this is real life, not the movie- the man died. I can't say how close the film sticks to the actual story, but then again for Stuart Gordon he makes his own spin on whatever happened in the case for pure agonizing terror and pitch-black satire. What happens is important, but not as important as the hopelessness of both characters in the situation: neither one can get what they want since they're both "stuck" as it were, one physically, and the other inside of her guilt-ridden head.

In the film we also get the ugly side of what it takes to 'make it', how these two characters, Tom and Brandi, are "products" of their society. One is penniless but ready tow work, screwed over by bureaucratic dummies and an unsympathetic landlord, and the other a ghetto-banger white girl who is looking at a potential promotion at the nursing home from nurse to head of the floor. In their own way they're sympathetic and pathetic at the same time; we might know these people, or maybe not care to know, and we're faced who they are deep down in the primal sense when squared off in that garage. The common sense that's defiled is not so much because Brandi is criminal, but because of desperation in her moral gage: she doesn't have any good support at the least from her ecstasy dealer-sleaze-boyfriend Rashid, and it's from this that it becomes a twisted neo-noir.

Gordon throws in very stark and cruelly funny images in the woodwork. Take a sex scene between Brandi and Rashid, mere minutes after she gets home after the accident and Rashid calms her down (partly with the drugs), and as she's getting sexed up she suddenly sees in front of her the bloody violence of Tom crashing right through the windshield. Perversely, as is wont to happen in Gordon's films, Rashid just keeps going on, making the scene totally tumultuous. And there's some awkward, perhaps too obvious bits thrown in when Tom tries to get passer-bys to help him in his predicament in the garage (one a Hispanic kid and mother who can't help by proxy of being illegals, another a guy with a little dog), but really Gordon's best focus is on this quandary of human nature.

Some may be repulsed by how it unfolds, but that's the point. This is as much a horror film as Re-Animator- minus the B-movie over-the-top humor of course- in how it looks at a matter of life and death. The question also is, what is human life really worth? How much is a guy who may or may not be truly homeless worth ultimately? Enough for someone with (limited) worth like Brandi to not get in trouble? Or Rashid, a dog of a man who can barely get together his bury-the-body plan? The end is something of a very dark "happy" ending, if that makes sense, but it does in this context. It's like the next logical step, or just a small subversion of, the line of film-noir; seeing this with a shot of Blood Simple would make for quite a movie night.