tederick.com reviews

• index
• tederick.com home

---

Rubber is a terribly candid film: it assures us, in its first amazing moments, that it is entirely meaningless, and then proceeds to be entirely meaningless. What a disappointment. In spite of how ably Police Lieutenant Chad delivers a straight-faced monologue to the camera / his audience, having just careened his car across a desert road to knock out a series of randomly-placed Ikea chairs before extracting from the dashboard an undisturbed glass of water, and describes to us in detail the vital lifeblood of "no reason" which runs through both life and art, it's a surprising letdown when, in Rubber's final moments, we realize that Chad made good on his promise.

If Rubber's first sequence is amazing, its second is sublime. An old tire wakes in a junkyard, and proceeds to learn that it can roll around quite successfully on its own. It also learns that it enjoys killing, and becomes good at it. The tire heads off down the highway, and for ten or so wondrous minutes, we may begin to suspect that Ramin Bahrani's Plastic Bag may soon topple from the peak of the polymer anthropomorph micro-genre, or at least, that there's a new Spike Jonze in town.

But wait. I have not mentioned the audience. Standing in our stead in the movie is a group of horribly unconvincing actors, purportedly watching the adventures of the rubber tire through binoculars, tended to by a geek of uncertain intentions. They are us, and the show continues for as long as they are there to watch it. In possible admission of having no good end-point for this whole Rubber affair, the filmmakers and/or their surrogates within the film soon attempt to bring things to a close by getting rid of the audience, one of whom proves stubborn in that regard. I suppose we're lucky to be out here, in the movie theatre, with slightly less control and proportionally less involvement.

The tire becomes enamoured of a girl in a bright red car, and follows her to a motel, so that he, and us, and the binocular-clutching meta-audience, can observe her bum. As she is played by Roxane Mesquida, one cannot blame the tire, nor the meta-audience, nor us, though any questions that may have mentally arisen regarding the extent to which the tire can logically carry his sexual attraction go unanswered. (Later, the tire is found watching Formula One racing in an adjacent motel room, which may, I suppose, be the rubber tire equivalent of XXX porn.) Meanwhile, the loose-limbed son of the motel owner has figured out that the tire is killing people. A standoff with the police ensues.

That the tire can kill people is tricky. It is, presumably, the reason the audience is here at all, both within the film and out here with the rest of us. "The Killer Tire Movie." As lunatic concepts go it is some kind of apex, and the first few times the tire quivers with inner rage and makes some living thing's head burst like Pop Rocks, we do appreciably howl our glee. It does become boring, though, as things go along, and more interesting questions supplant our interest in cranium-blasting wheels. Questions like, why did Lt. Chad survive those shots to the chest? Why did the geek eat the eclairs? What was the tire's life before all this, of which we are shown a teasing glance, but no more? The tire was manufactured, sold, and drove around the world for months or years or decades, before ending up in that junk pile. What did it think it was then, vs. what it thinks it is now? Why is it so hell-bent on revenge, and why did it become so taken with the girl in the red car?

I know, I know.