Is It Safe?
Pairing up Steve Martin and Helena Bonham Carter might
seem a bit of an odd move to those who haven't given
the matter much thought. Ex-standup comedian Martin,
after all, made a career over the past decade in the
role of upper-middle-class suburbanite, whereas the
U.K.-born Bonham Carter's U.S. success has come in
recent years from portraying the disaffected.
Whether playing the Marxist, liberal-humanist primate
in Planet of the Apes or the chain-smoking
career neurotic in Fight Club, the
post-Merchant and Ivory Bonham Carter has seemingly
preferred to peer in at yuppie and upper-crust society
from the outside. Martin, on the other hand -- in
films like The Out-of-Towners, Planes,
Trains, and Automobiles, Parenthood, and
Grand Canyon -- seems most at home in parables
of outside forces that threaten and trouble the middle
class.
Think of the Clarks' epic suffering in New York City
in the Out of Towners or Neal Page's similarly
random misfortunes in the motels and open highways of
the rural Midwest in Planes, Trains. Both Clark
and Page must retreat to their suburban homes to give
these movies their happily-ever-after endings. These
movies resolve the fear that rogue social elements --
the working classes, civil servants, eccentric
salesmen without fixed addresses, airplane hijackers
-- might bring chaos to the hermetic white-collar
world. Yet this disruption is precisely what's
celebrated in Fight Club and Planet of the
Apes, or at least in the roles Bonham Carter plays
in these films.
Both Bonham Carter and Martin partly reprise, partly
expound on these previous roles in first time director
David Atkins' Novocaine. The contrast in their
typecasts might establish certain expectations that
one or the other performer will break out of
previously established patterns. But Novocaine
thwarts these expectations, largely because of Atkins'
occasionally scattered, often inspired, and always
genre-bending direction.
Atkins' most conspicuous debt is to Robert Altman's
Dr. T and the Women, from which he borrows
Novocaine's
medical-professional-besieged-by-female-sexuality
motif (as well as the earlier movie's Laura Dern, who
plays such an identical character that she seems to
have simply stayed put and allowed respective film
crews to break down and set up around her). Atkins'
field of influences is much broader than Altman,
though. As Frank, the movie's imperiled dentist on the
lam, Steve Martin's film noir voiceover nods at
Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity and Sunset
Boulevard. Like the protagonists in many of
Wilder's films (particularly Double Indemnity),
Frank finds himself in a nightmare life as a fugitive
after succumbing to a momentary temptation. But
because the movie's relationship to noir
conventions about paranoia is fairly uneasy, its
atmosphere becomes more surreal -- more like a David
Lynch or David Cronenberg project -- as the movie
unfolds.
The movie is most noir in its first two reels,
as Dr. Frank Sangster (Martin) falls into the thrall
of femme fatale Susan Ivy (Bonham Carter).
Masquerading as a patient in need of a root canal,
Susan flirts with Frank until he writes her a
prescription for Demerol, then seduces him and
subsequently steals the liquid cocaine he uses
(legally, we're to believe) as an anesthetic. After
this happens, Frank starts lying repeatedly to his
fiancee, Jean (Laura Dern), first to conceal his
unfaithfulness and later to disguise his culpability
as he runs further and further afoul of the law.
His troubles intensify when the corpse of Susan's
sexually abusive brother (Scott Caan) turns up in
Frank's home and, framed for the crime, Frank finds
himself a fugitive from the law. In spite of the
complexity of the events that befall him, Frank
continually refers to his marital secrecy in voiceover
as he tries to come to grips with his increasingly
dire situation. "Lying is a lot like tooth decay," he
declares at one point. "One small lie, and everything
unravels from there."
This observation serves a purpose similar to the
doorman's warning in Alice in Wonderland,
grounding the rest of the movie to an extent, but not
quite accounting for the all the glorious weirdness
that follows. On one level, what ensues after Frank's
first fatal lie is mere evidence in a Faustian drama
about the importance of telling the truth. After the
body's discovery, however, Frank is repeatedly watched
and investigated, and the movie ends up being much
stranger than the story of a simple, ordered universe
where lies bring swift, unambiguous justice. First,
Jean dogs him with seemingly innocent questions; her
questions are followed up by the curiosities of a DEA
agent, a detective, a forensics investigator, and even
Kevin Bacon, who makes a cameo as Lance Phelps, a
Hollywood star hanging around a police station to
study for an upcoming part.
These characters are simultaneously disarming and
imposing, as good interrogators should be. Although
the DEA agent shows up not in a dark suit but a goofy
argyle sweater, for instance, he still makes it quite
clear that he has the power to ruin Frank's career and
take away his freedom. There seems more to Phelps than
meets the eye as well. Tagging along with the
investigator on Frank's case, Phelps questions Frank
viciously, but retreats at once when Frank protests,
insisting he is just practicing his role.
Is Phelps on the level, a mere observer, or is he a
covert participant in Frank's interrogation?
Novocaine's most, shall we say pointed,
collapse of these various categories is the
telescoping camera designed to aid Frank in his
practice by enabling him to see inside his patients'
mouths. Given the archetypal anxiety dentists provoke
-- Susan initially displays this anxiety when she
comes into Frank's office for a root canal, although
later on her fear is revealed to be a put-on to
manipulate Frank into doing her bidding -- this
implement seems alternately like a bizarre torture
device and a kinky sex aid. Either way, it represents
an alliance of penetration and surveillance and gives
the act of looking a literally intrusive force.
The telescoping camera is only a single instance of
the movie's pervasive, Orwellian suspicion of
image-gathering instruments. After Frank becomes a
fugitive, a closed circuit camera feed, for instance,
serves as an establishing shot for his entrance into a
bar. This imagery is even more pervasive in the
movie's extra-narrative apparatus: the bar that wipes
from scene to scene is a tinted x-ray that scans the
screen like the bulb of a xerox machine. And yet for
all this postmodern funhouse symbolism,
Novocaine's biggest concern still seems to be
with the act of lying, and Frank is far from the only
guilty party. Amid Susan's prevarications and the
deceptions of all the agents of the law who pursue
Frank, the lies come fast and furious in
Novocaine, leading one to suppose that perhaps
Frank's -- and, by extension, the film's -- descent
into the progressively more bizarre is not a result of
Frank's single, unremarkable lie, but his overarching
guilt.
