World Premiere, 86 min.
Country and Year: USA (2006)
Director: Eric Eason
Starring: Brendan Fraser, Scott Glenn

Review by: Charlie Prince
Rating: 3 out of 4 stars

When scrolling through the films playing at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, there was only one movie that I decided I absolutely had to see: Journey to the End of the Night. Many of our readers might not have heard of Eric Eason. He’d only directed one film prior to this one and though it was a darling on the festival circuit, it has only had distribution through the little-known dvd-of-the-month club Film Movement (in fact, I originally subscribed to Film Movement because they had this film). I had heard about Eason during a brief stint interning for a production company out in Hollywood – everyone in the office was excited about his first film Manito, and they even attached him to direct a movie about the capture of FBI double agent Robert Hanssen. But that movie has yet to surface and in the meantime four years had gone by since Manito tore up the festival circuit. Until this year’s Tribeca Film Festival that is. And given the City of God-like crime plot set in Brazil, I had high hopes for this one.

Manito was a good crime film with no-name actors and a high sense of realism, at the expense of fantastic plot devices and surprise twists. Journey to the End of the Night, though it is also a crime film, aims at a more stylized, surreal tone. Set in Sao Paolo, Brendan Fraser stars as Paul, whose father Sinatra, played by Scott Glenn, runs a local whorehouse as a small time thug with a much younger employee-turned-wife Angie (Catalina Moreno of Maria Full of Grace fame). Despite an obviously troubled relationship, Father and son have teamed up for one large drug deal as their ticket out to a better life. Their bags are packed and they’ve said their goodbyes, all that’s needed is to trade the drugs for cash (the trade is being accomplished via their “runner,” who speaks Yurobo, the language needed to transact business with the buyers).

You don’t have to watch 500 movies a year to know what this type of setup leads to. In the world of film, a police officer on his last day before retirement will face a life-and-death situation, getting married in a kung fu film more or less guarantees that the newlywed bride’s days are numbered and when a small time crook looks to one last, big score to change his life, you know with absolute certainty that everything is about to go wrong.

Journey to the End of the Night wastes no time in this pattern – right off the bat the runner for the deal dies of a heart attack while having sex with a prostitute. This screws up Paul’s plans two-fold. One, they need a new runner who speaks Yurobo by the next day – someone they can trust to not run off with their money. But for Paul, who had ambitious plans to steal his father’s share of the money and had worked out an arrangement with the now-dead runner to do that, he is going to have to come up with a new plan for that as well. You see, Paul has serious gambling debts that need paying, and so in order for him to make a new life for himself, his own share of the deal isn’t enough. And, to make things more complicated, he’s also planning on stealing his father’s lovely wife (along with her small child) in the process, as they appear to be having an affair together. As you may have guessed, Paul doesn’t feel much in the way of allegiance to his father.

But Sinatra, who knows only that they need a new runner, has a plan: Wemba is a dishwasher in their club and speaks Yurobo. He asks Wemba if he’d like to make some money: “enough that you’ll never have to wash another dish as long as you live.” Wemba agrees, and a new last-minute effort to sell the drugs is hatched.

What sets Journey apart from Manito, however, is what is going on in the background. In Manito everything felt very real – austerely plausible. But in Journey to the End of the Night, all sorts of strange, surreal things are happening around the main plot. Wemba gets mugged but the muggers don’t know enough to take the millions of dollars he’d gotten in the drug deal out of his backpack. A grandmother consults a fortune teller, who seems to genuinely have the gift. He predicts that her granddaughter will die that night, and so said granddaughter later helps Wemba, we know they have an ominous night ahead of them. Paul, in the meantime, had provoked a male cross-dressing prostitute who randomly walks by his window and ends up chasing him/her down in a short-lived fistfight that ends badly for the revenge-minded cross-dresser. There’s even a quietly funny scene that would seem to have taken a page from the Jim Jarmusch school of comedy. In a heartfelt moment, Paul tries to prove to Angie’s small child that sometimes even monkeys fly, tying a small stuffed monkey to a balloon and letting it fall out the window – only to plummet to the ground.

In the midst of this zaniness, some more standard crime film conventions take place. Wemba’s delayed return, sends the suspicious father-son pair into a frenzy. A dirty cop seeks payoff money from Paul and Sinatra for not interfering in the drug sale, and Paul’s bookie continues to pester him for payment. We find out how they got this one-time shot at the drugs to begin with. Simply enough, a Russian patron of the whorehouse was shot by his angry wife while he was there. Behind he left a suitcase full of drugs, and as a result the movie’s scheme was hatched. I won’t give away the ending except to say that things continue to come to a boil as Paul confronts his father and before long a Reservoir Dogs-style shoot-out is at hand.

Brendan Fraser is not as unlikely a star in an indie film like Journey to the End of the Night as most people think. His performance as the pool boy for aging, gay Frankenstein director James Whale revealed he had acting talent above and beyond the Mummy films he is best known for. But unlike in that film, Journey to the End of the Night had a comic edge to it that always seemed on the verge of breaking out. This is especially true of the unbelievable ending, and the fact that (small spoiler here) everything breaks down because Paul and Sinatra believe Wemba has run off with their money, when we in the audience know he’s trying to get back. These are not laugh-out-loud funny elements by any means, but contributes to a sense of an intentionally absurdist drama. Brendan Fraser’s delivery throughout the second half of the film in particular seems to amplify this sense of an under-the-surface joke. The matter-of-fact tone in which he plainly tells his father “I’m cutting you out of your share of the money,” is a little bit funny by itself – we can’t wait to see Sinatra’s reaction, if nothing else. Perhaps the hard-to-define tone sticks out partially in contrast to the more strictly realist City of God or Eason’s own earlier Manito. In any case, the film could have gone either way, it could have played it as a straight crime drama, or as a spoofier sorta-comedy along the lines of a Quentin Tarantino film, but as it stands it seems to fall in the cracks a bit between those poles. Still a good movie, and worth seeing, but to a small extent the plot is too serious to be funny and too absurd to be serious. I don’t know if Eason was intentionally trying to walk that line, but the neither-here-nor-there tone held the film back from being as great as his debut film.

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::: Tribeca Film Festival Site

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© Charlie Prince