In 'Minus Man,' oddball equations don't add up

By Alex Rubens

In The Minus Man, a drifter named Vann (Owen Wilson, of The Haunting) comes into a quiet coastal town in his pickup truck, rents a room, and gets a job as a mailman. Vann is gentle, good-natured, and eminently likable. He uses his turn-signals conscientiously and goes out of his way to right overturned garbage cans. He is completely harmless—except for the fact that he murders people on a semi-regular basis.

COURTESY YAHOO! MOVIES Psycho is as psycho does in Hampton Fancher's 'The Minus Man.'

When he is not concentrating on his casually sinister hobby, Vann befriends his landlords and reacts to the romantic advances of Ferrin (Janeane Garofalo), his fellow mail clerk, with a mix of naïveté and discomfort. As Ferrin grows more important to him and the police begin to put together clues, he seems ready to put away his poisoned amaretto and settle down.

What makes Vann interesting—in comparison to a character like Norman Bates—is that Vann's friendliness isn't a mask or a thin crust of decency over a smoldering mass of bloodthirst; Vann is gentle through and through. Consequently, he resists summary or explanation. He takes special care not to frighten his victims or to let them know at any point that they are dying. He also only selects unhappy people to murder, but he doesn't kill them simply to ease their pain. "They come to me like moths because I shine," Vann tells us. The film also compares him at one point to a toad who will "eat anything small enough to get into its mouth." Vann isn't totally amoral—what he does troubles him, just not in the right way. After killing teen football star Gene (Eric Mabius), he goes with his landlord and the rest of the town on a search for the missing boy, and, as he tells us in a voice-over, "I look harder than anyone. I look so hard I forget there's nothing to find."

Wilson is appropriately blank as Vann—he is so opaque that the occasional variations in his attitude stand out violently. A series of cryptic (and ultimately unsuccessful) scenes involving a pair of imaginary, antagonistic cops (Dwight Yoakam and Dennis Haysbert) are the only hint of any significant internal turmoil. But then, just as we start to see him as almost Gumpishly simple and good, we catch a glimpse of something in him that we don't like and can't understand.

Hampton Fancher's direction is usually understated, despite one or two pointlessly indulgent sequences. The opening scene is perfectly bizarre and couldn't have been better suited to the feel of the film. After tenderly washing his pickup truck, Vann waves to us, flashing a camera-smile, in a perverse parody of home-movie realism. Then, as Vann drives down the highway, the camera pulls back inside the truck, and the windshield becomes letterbox, the highway a film within a film. Before Vann has done a thing, we know that his interaction with reality is going to be distanced at the very least. The movie maintains that kind of twisted wit and ingenuity, but it's often so subtle that it is all but imperceptible and not particularly enjoyable.

Garofalo does an impressive job as Ferrin. Far from the actress's usual cool and sarcastic persona, Ferrin is timid but earnest, fighting shyness and winning. It is not often that you can pity and respect a character simultaneously. The more time Vann spends with her, the more he opens up and is able to relate to other people. We begin to sense this and ready ourselves for heavy-handed moralizing and a predictable outcome. Fortunately, the film defies these expectations and keeps coming up with new surprises. However, those surprises are never quite enough; what one comes away with does not require an entire film or go much beyond the premise. The Minus Man doesn't seem to mean anything; its distance and odd pacing alienate to no apparent end. More and better things could have been done with such a fascinating character and concept.

The ad campaign for The Minus Man is based entirely on the claim (or challenge) that the movie will have you talking about it in spite of yourself. This is a bit like ads bragging that your Domino's pizza will arrive speedily or that your bowl of Rice Krispies will make noise: it distracts you from what actually matters about the product. As it happens, the claim is accurate only in an underhanded manner: the film is thought-provoking to a point, but what will really start conversations is an inexplicably heart-pounding final scene that is either brilliant or absolutely nonsensical.

Though The Minus Man is imperfect, everyone should see it immediately so that the poor souls who have seen it already will have more people to talk to about that last scene. The poster does say, "Don't See It Alone." Apparently, they were serious.

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