Tusk,
directed by Kevin Smith
(R, 102 minutes)
Tusk is a mess of a movie, self-referential and self-aggrandizing in a peculiar self-deprecating way that writer-director Kevin Smith has perfected. It is oddly paced and burdened with a perverse resistance to engage the larger issues it teases. More than 20 years after his magnificent slacker masterpiece Clerks, Smith still casts himself as an unlettered movie brat who refuses to take himself seriously.
Based on a classified ad allegedly placed in the United Kingdom by an ancient mariner who offered free lodging to any potential roommate who would spend two hours a day dressed in a walrus costume (which turned out to be a hoax), Smith and collaborator Scott Mosier came up with a story about a mad old salt who entraps unsuspecting lodgers and attempts through mutilation to turn them into walruses.
The chief victim in the movie is Wallace Bryton (Justin Long), a cultural bottom-feeder who, with his best friend Teddy (Haley Joel Osment), has found a lucrative niche on the Internet trashing geeks and weirdos who through incompetence become memes. They call their show the “Not-See Party” because the premise involves Wallace traveling around conducting the interviews while Teddy stays home.
Their latest target is a Canadian teenager who has gained notoriety as “The Kill Bill Kid” for a viral video in which he accidentally severs his leg while performing a routine with a samurai sword. But when Wallace arrives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to interview the kid, he finds he has been driven to suicide by cyber-bullying.
This puts Wallace in a jam; he needs a topic for the next show. So he answers an ad he finds posted on a bathroom wall in which an old sailor practically begs for company, and he travels two hours to arrive at a spooky house inhabited by a man who calls himself Howard Howe (Michael Parks). And he begins to listen to Howard’s story about life at sea, including befriending Ernest Hemingway on D-Day and how a walrus saved his life. But he’s getting sleepy ….
When Wallace awakes, he has lost a limb and gained the understanding that Howard is not the quirky old gentleman he seems.
This film isn’t for everyone. It is not a great movie, but Smith has never claimed to be anything other than a sort of inspired amateur who has somehow acquired the means to realize his goal. Whatever else it is, Tusk is a product of one person’s uncompromising vision.
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