The “hateful, cruel, moronic” movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “I cringed”
History has shown on numerous occasions that it’s entirely possible for a great movie to be populated by irredeemable characters, but ‘great movie’ is the key. When Roger Ebert saw a film that was full of people he immediately disliked, there was no chance it would get anything other than a scathing review.
Depending on your mileage and personal preference, there are plenty of examples to illustrate the above point. At least one, if not many more, of the key players in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, and even Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy are, for lack of a better word, arseholes.
And yet, because everything around them is so compelling, immersive, and well-realised, it’s easy to overlook their many, many flaws, and get on board with a film that sinks its hooks in from the very first scene and refuses to let go until the credits come up. It can be done, but it usually takes a special kind of filmmaker to make it happen.
Unfortunately for Ebert and the 99 minutes he spent waiting for it to end, Derick Martini was not one of those filmmakers, and his sophomore directorial effort, 2011’s coming-of-age dramedy Hick, was not one of those movies, with the critic left questioning why he, or any other audience members, should even care about anything that unfolds onscreen.
“Hick is a film about a damaged 13-year-old girl who runs away from an alcohol-soaked home and encounters only hateful, cruel, or moronic people,” he wrote in a 1.5-star review. “I cringed. It contains some effective performances, it does a good job of evoking bereft and empty landscapes, but what is it for? Has she learned anything? Have we?”
The runaway in question is played by Chloë Grace Moretz, who receives a gun for her 13th birthday, as one does, and subsequently flees her family home with Las Vegas in her sights, where she encounters Eddie Redmayne’s drifter and Blake Lively’s cocaine-hoovering low-level criminal, opening her eyes to a new way of life on the questionable side of the law.
Along with those three, the cast also features Juliette Lewis, Rory Culkin, and Alec Baldwin, so it’s neither short on star power nor talented actors. And yet, the most praise that Ebert could muster had nothing to do with the movie at all, but rather Martini’s previous picture, Lymelife, and the possibilities of what could come after.
“We’re dealing with a gifted filmmaker,” he explained. “No matter how I’ve made it sound, Hick does not play as an exploitation film, but shows every evidence of being a serious undertaking. I believe he has good films in his future. Hick was written by Andrea Portes, based on her novel. They obviously hoped they were up to something.”
Clearly, Ebert didn’t think they’d gotten up to much here, blasting the screenplay for pushing its protagonist into “one ugly encounter after another” with no personal growth, after she “foolishly repeats her mistakes on what promises to be an even more unhappy scale.” He wasn’t sure what the message was, if there was even one at all, leaving him at a loss to figure out what the point of the movie was supposed to be, if it had one to begin with.
