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I’m A Loser, Baby
By bukkhead | June 13, 2007
FILM REVIEW: ‘EAGLE VS SHARK’
Written and directed by Taika Cohen
Rated R
93 mins.
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One of the songs in Eagle vs Shark asks us to compare apples and tangerines,(more poetic than oranges) as likely a pair as an eagle and a shark. But the only real difference between Lily and Jerrod is that she knows she’s in love with a loser, while he has no idea who he is. Jerrod only know who he wants to be.
Lily (Loren Horsley) works the till at a fast food joint, and spends her days either waiting for the glasses-wearing, mullet-sporting Jerrod (Jemaine Clement), or dreaming about him once he’s left. Eventually she finds a way to meet him formally, at a party he’s thrown for people to come dressed as their favorite animal. At last Jerrod takes notice, impressed by her costume, and even more impressed by her video-game skills.
Jerrod has no real redeeming qualities, but we are benefitted to seeing him through Lily’s eyes. Jerrod has a mission: to beat up the man who used to bully him in high school. Of course his real mission is to make himself into the image of his dead brother, the champion of the family. He yearns for the respect and love of his father almost as much as Lily yearns for Jerrod. But while visiting his family, Lily slowly peels away the lies that he has heaped on about himself: he’s worked so hard to puff himself up, but the only person who is impressed is himself. Lily, for her part, is disappointed in the liar, not the lies, since she only ever wanted the man who walked past her till every day at noon.
Writer/Director Taika Cohen uses relics from the eighties to firmly establish a kind of “loser chic” in which a man like Jerrod can become a hero. Actually, it’s not the eighties per-se, but the era in which these characters, who are ostensibly in their mid-thirties now, were teenagers. Cohen is unapologetic in his use of cliché: Big braces, Mortal Kombat, mullets, Amway, nun-chucks and Kiss graffiti… Lily and Jerrod are still mired in their awkward phase, both literally and figuratively.
Eagle possesses an economy of dialogue that sets it apart from your average romantic comedy. Few moments extend past more than three or four minutes of speaking, and there is a refreshing dearth of soliloquies. Instead, we are allowed to watch as Lily watches, whether it’s Jerrod training for his big fight, or as she watches her life slowly revolve around her.
Comparisons to Napoleon Dynamite are inevitable, of course, but where Napoleon was a character sketch, Eagle extends the idea to “who would fall in love with such a man?” And the film is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, in that Cohen can break apart your assumptions as easily as he relies upon them. Look for Lily’s brother (Joel Tobeck) who doesn’t steal the scenes as much as bring them back to where they belong. In a romantic comedy, apples always accept tangerines, just the way they are. And Eagles love Sharks.
(This review was printed in the Newport Mercury.)
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