The Chumscrubber

Synopsis: Dean (Jamie Bell) is best friends with Troy, a young man who kills himself for reasons unknown. Troy was the local drug dealer, so now his  customers want to ensure their supply. They kidnap Dean’s brother, or think they have, and everything gets confused from there.

Who or what is The Chumscrubber? He’s a character in a fictional television series and computer game. An alienated youth version of the headless horseman, possibly a metaphor for how modern society has lost its head. Maybe. The character has pretty much nothing much to do with the film at all, aside from being some kind of cool cypher that leads nowhere. So forget the name, forget the character, they’re meaningless. The actual film centres on Dean, Billy Elliot all grown up, and his coming to terms with a life lived without feeling. His father (William Fichtner), a pop psychologist who writes books based on him, constantly prescribes him pills to make him “normal”. Naturally he’s anything but that. So when he discovers Troy’s body he doesn’t even react, and he can’t really grasp why he doesn't. He just says he didn’t think anyone would understand or care. And when the local dealers who were dependent on Troy for the supply of their mood-stabilising drugs resort to kidnapping, Dean doesn’t react. He doesn’t care about anyone else. But they need their drugs and won’t leave him alone and so he gets drawn into a truly bizarre situation.

Numbness, insensitivity and the reasons for unfeeling appear to be the base of this unusual film. The numerous plot threads ultimately hang on people's individual selfishness and self-obsession. It's quite a depressing film when considered as that, but since it's a satire you're guaranteed a few laughs along the way. There’s Ralph Fiennes’s Mayor, more obsessed with his personal revelations about fate than his impending wedding. His fiancé is too obsessed with the wedding to notice her son has been kidnapped by drug dealers. And her ex-husband (the local police officer) is obsessed with her. Not to mention Glenn Close’s turn as Troy’s mother, who visits everyone to thank them for being so nice, for cooking for her, etc when they haven’t done a thing. A passive-aggressive plea to have her grief recognised, and a simple statement that people are too busy to care about each other in a world of medicated happiness.

The ideas of the film are great, and the kidnapping plot works a treat for the most part. The descent into madness and a kind of sanity in that, which is the ultimate trajectory of the film, doesn’t play out entirely convincingly but it still satisfies. In summary, The Chumscrubber is a film of big ideas and that’s to be commended, and if it never quite reaches the significance that it’s obviously striving for, it’s an entertaining ride with a lot of fun moments.

 

 

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