Collaborator

★★

(2011)

Hal Hartley regular Martin Donovan makes his directorial debut alongside the terse, intense figure of David Morse, playing Robert Longfellow, a play write in self imposed exile at his mothers house in Los Angeles after a barrage of bad reviews in New York for his latest work. Leaving his wife and kids behind he tries to avoid encounters with old school mate Gus (Morse), a borderline psychopath who still lives across the street and decides to look up an old girlfriend, actress Emma (the always lovely Olivia Williams). None of this really has anything to do with the crux of Collaborator. It is only when Gus takes Robert hostage that things really start to happen.

Unfortunately for Donovan those things aren’t constructed well enough to lend any new weight to a genre of film that has returned again and again to our screen and, through his own script is bristling with good ideas, it never really stings the way it should. In the films best moments Gus, infatuated with the Vietnam war, and Robert, with his own failures and infidelities, devise an improvisational acting class to air their grievances but end up only muddying the waters. The media frenzy is pretty ludicrous, the negotiator is a stinker and while two mothers wait outside the ideas slowly sink.

Though easy enough to watch one can’t get away from the fact that Donovan is leaning far too heavily towards making a much better play than he has a feature film and the stilted dialogue which can work wonderfully in more atmospheric pictures deflects any shot at awkwardness funny and instead makes Collaborator feel slow and amateur. Olivia Williams is sweet in her small role of Emma and Morse and Donovan do undeniably well. The pair sometimes manage to stir a laugh or strike a darker chord in unison but the sharpness and originality the few good ideas seem afterwards like little more than ripples on the surface of a pretty dirty pond.