NORMAL boasts more than enough bona fides to excite a certain kind of audience (me): a script by creator of John Wick (2014) Derek Kolstad, again collaborating with star Bob Odenkirk (Nobody, 2021); Ben Wheatley directing; the promise of small-town, Main Street gunplay. Any one of which should be sufficient to assure a good time at the movies. Normal delivers on that promise, especially when unburdened by the probably vain hope (mine) that it might amount to something more.
I’ve been a fan of Wheatley’s work since Kill List (2011), a folk-horror gangster picture that announced the arrival of distinct, dark curiosity to the gritty little world of subgenre. Sightseers (2012), High-Rise (2015, from the J.G. Ballard novel) and Free Fire (2016) further demonstrated an aptitude for stylistic variation, ranging from the incidentally captured to Gothically formal to technically complex. When he got the ticket for the biggish ride with Meg 2: The Trench (2023), I was still on board; programmer trash in the hands of an artist can, after all, make for some of the most entertaining trash there is. Which is not to suggest Normal is trash, or even a programmer really, but therein lies the problem.
Seemingly mononymic temporary sheriff Ulysses (Odenkirk) — even his uniform bears only a label-maker rendered tag with that moniker — arrives in Normal, Minnesota, with low expectations and even lower morale. Estranged from his wife, for whom he leaves rambling voicemails that serve as a stilted voiceover, he has become an itinerant fill-in, unmoored from himself and from moral certainty. There’s tragedy shadowing Ulysses (which feels like misplaced literary high-mindedness), and going through the motions seems to be the only way through. Normal turns out to be the wrong place for ambivalence and complacency, though, as the unexplainably affluent, once-struggling small town soon proves.
To its credit, Normal very quickly delivers on the promise of criminal mayhem, clearly drawing on Hot Fuzz (2007) and Fargo (1996) for mood, archetype and story elements. A desperate couple’s attempt to have something manifests in an ill-fated bank robbery, which reveals a chamber of secrets, a local cabal and (it’s revealed in the opening scene) the vested interest of some particularly bloodthirsty Osaka gangsters. Graphic mayhem ensues.
Had Normal stuck to its plan (beleaguered lawman in moral crisis goes it alone against a cartoon cavalcade of co-conspirators), I think it would go down as a rousing success. Taken as it is, though, the movie suggests more than it gives us with suggested character arcs only half-heartedly developed, pat narrative resolutions, shades of commentary on late-empire dissolution and desperation left only partially addressed. It’s a delightful thing to see Odenkirk remaking himself as a mid-life action hero, but just a little more of the hair-trigger Midwestern taciturnity we came to love on Mr. Show would go a long way. Ulysses is sympathetic and relatable, but the handling of his existential crisis fails to yield anything in which we can truly invest. And the violence, gleeful as much of it is in situ, still can’t obscure the simple fact that the story isn’t as full-blooded as it would like to be.R. 90M. BROADWAY.
PILLION. The now months-old buzz around this would suggest it is a hardcore gay-biker sex movie — and it is that, in moments — but to imagine it only that way dismisses its emotional fullness and complexity, recasting it as something grandiose in its purported transgressiveness. It is actually a delicately rendered modern fairytale, an exploration of exploration, of inchoate need and the imperative of finding satisfaction and identity through non-verbal communication and self-recognition.
The feature debut of writer-director Harry Lighton (adapting the Adam Mars-Jones’ novella Box Hill), Pillion details the journey of Colin (Harry Melling), a lonely young man from a loving, supportive family, who enters the world of the “impossibly handsome” Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), a beyond-Alpha motorcyclist whose world — and affections — Colin could only have previously imagined. Their relationship is rendered, even at its roughest, with careful, sensitive insight. Ray is as compartmentalized as Colin, though his overt sexuality and swaggering composure might suggest otherwise, and the dom-sub dynamic in which they engage becomes a crucible for largely unspoken self-discovery.
The ambiguity with which Lighton handles the subjects of consent and the boundaries of abuse speaks to a modern, expansive worldview. The camera’s task is to observe, rather than to render judgement. If we, as observers of that observation, should freight it with our own provincial hang-ups, shame on us. And that, to me, is what’s really at the core of the thing: shame, or the assignment thereof, as the enemy of self-acknowledgement and progress. Love, as Ray intones, “isn’t what this is about,” but he’s speaking from his own insecurity as much as from his pose of self-possession. Because Pillion is what we so often over-simplify by calling love-story, a naturalistic fable about finding oneself and a place for it in and among the selves of others. NR. 106M. PRIME.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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This article appears in One School, Nine Students.