There is a recent generation of American men who came of age too late for free love and wanton property grabbing, and too early for post-grunge emotional wankery and info-age immediacy. Stuck on their iceberg, isolated by oceans from anything real, like the original punk or goth movements or Australia's cinematic new wave, they loitered in the suburbs, fondling illegal fireworks, obsessing over barely legal David Cronenberg videos (primary theme: "Sex is weird"), wondering why life wasn't showing up. Presumptuous as this sounds, it appears that this is the narrative voice behind the new psychological thriller The Butterfly Effect.
Flutter by: Amy Smart and Ashton Kutcher get real in
The Butterfly Effect.
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Indeed, the hallmarks of Gen-X ennui infest this oddly impressive debut feature from Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber (the screenwriters behind the clever Final Destination 2). Heroism is at work here, but it's clouded by much sadness and paranoia. Clearly these two saw The Dead Zone (a gem from Cronenberg's peak) at an impressionable age and took its cues to join the great creative exodus to Canada, where almost all American films of this ilk are shot nowadays.
The story concerns twentyish Evan (marketable funny fellow Ashton Kutcher, playing it straight), who is something of a nutcase. We first catch him in the act of ransacking someone's office, hotly pursued, desperate for evidence of something, but quickly we flash back to his childhood self (convincingly played by Logan Lerman at seven and John Patrick Amedori at thirteen). In the fashion of a New Line suspense feature, we are afforded some suburban malaise and a creepy piano tinkle à la Nightmare on Elm Street, but this time the monster is internalized. For about half an hour, we get a dose of Evan's rotten childhood, his broken home, his loopy friends, his institutionalized father (Callum Keith Rennie), the local sicko (Eric Stoltz) and, most tellingly, his disturbing blackouts. A friendly doctor (Nathaniel Deveaux) makes a suggestion to Evan's excessively doting mother (Melora Walters): Advise the boy to keep journals, to record every significant event of his turbulent life in prose, the better to comprehend and survive it. Evan does, to his later peril.
Sustaining his '70s cowlicks even though we're in the '80s and '90s, Evan grows up -- partly, anyway -- to become Kutcher. Braying alterna-rock crapola kicks in to inform us that it's Hipster College Time, but even as a cocky psych major ("Was it Pavlov that conditioned his dog to lick his nuts?"), it's amply evident that Evan is still screwed up. He boasts to his huge goth roommate, Thumper (the delightfully game Ethan Suplee), that he's had no blackouts for seven years, but childhood scars remain. In the story's strangest supernatural twist, he learns to reassume his youthful dimensions, literally, via reading from his meticulously preserved journals. Grown-up Evan revisits his childhood blackouts, which radically (dude!) alter the shape of his present. The movie takes its title from the premise in chaos theory that the smallest catalyst in one place (or time) can cause calamitous ripples in another (it's that "butterfly flaps wings here, causes typhoon there" theory). Evan learns about this the hard way.
There's some really good material in The Butterfly Effect, especially considering that the script was written seven years ago, when its creators were significantly younger. Of particular note are the scenes with Stoltz, who plays the deranged "fuckbag" father of a couple of Evan's friends. Still as boyishly handsome as Kutcher, Stoltz makes a curious choice for a child pornographer -- complete with twisted Robin Hood scenarios -- which adds a dizzying sense of fear to his portrayal.
It's also fair to praise the work of Kutcher (in his dramatic debut) and Amy Smart, who plays Kayleigh, the "grown-up" version of his childhood sweetheart (and, for you Jungians, his anima). Each time Evan messes with the past, he creates a new scenario for himself and a new path for Kayleigh, who becomes, variously, a hard-luck waitress, a sorority bimbo and a ruined junkie prostitute. Smart is splendid in her transformations, even when she and Kutcher get bogged down by the sometimes chuckle-worthy heavy-handedness of the direction.
This is no perfect movie. Kind of like Johnny Depp's appraisal of America, it often behaves like a puppy that feels obliged to growl and gnash its teeth in frightened self-importance. The dynamic among Evan, Kayleigh's malevolent brother Tommy (William Lee Scott) and cracked-up friend Lenny (Elden Henson) becomes increasingly silly until it throws up its hands and goes for the laugh. Much of the "tough talk" here is just plain hilarious; when Evan goes to prison, it's not mere rape to be feared, but rape by evil skinhead Nazis. (Thankfully, there's a demographic-pleasing Latino Christian on hand to help out.) Actually, though, because elements like the fraternity bullshit come off feeling so much like real life in some circles (Gruber attended USC), much can be forgiven. As a thriller, The Butterfly Effect is iffy and uneven, but as a portrait of a people, it's effective and intriguing.
