Bug

I am fascinated by the films that receive F Cinemascores. There’s something about them that I want to appreciate. Most of the time, I end up completely understanding the scores, like with Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, but then there are times when I fairly disagree like with Andrew Dominick’s Killing Them Softly. William Friedkin’s Bug, though, leans much more fully towards the former. This is an intentionally ugly film that wears its theatrical roots on its sleeve taking what might have worked on stage and not finding a way to adapt it for the screen. Friedkin had had very good success of just applying cinematic tools to the physical filmmaking when adapting stage plays in the past especially regarding The Boys in the Band and 12 Angry Men, but Bug is different. Bug‘s stage bound efforts at paranoia, thriller mechanics, and insanity don’t translate well to the screen despite Friedkin’s cinematic acumen.

Agnes (Ashley Judd) is a woman working at a honkey-tonk in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma, living out of a run-down motel, with only one real friend to her name, R.C. (Lynn Collins), who brings over a strange young man, Peter (Michael Shannon) to hang out after work one night. He’s awkward and slow to warm up, but it’s obvious that he finds Agnes attractive, but she has other problems. Her ex-husband, Jerry (Harry Connick Jr.) has just been let out of prison, and she thinks he’s the one calling her repeatedly without saying a word when she picks up the phone.

The overall progression of events is that Agnes and Peter slowly get to know each other, Agnes mostly revealing herself early because she’s the more normal of the two. She and Jerry had a son who vanished in a grocery store nine years prior, an event that obviously caused a lot of damage in both of their lives, and Agnes still has no idea what happened to the boy. She lives in fear of Jerry, who shows up unannounced the morning after Agnes’ first meeting with Peter, and Peter ends up representing some kind of new connection in her life. After they sleep together, Peter begins to reveal himself through the pursuit of bugs, namely aphids that are so small that they’re invisible. He talks Agnes into believing in them, and the belief steadily spirals out of control for the next half of the film.

Essentially, Agnes and Peter become a self-perpetuating conspiracy theory of paranoia that’s ever-changing and completely unfalsifiable. It’s an ever-increasing series of claims about where the bugs are coming from, their purpose, and their effect that require increasingly drastic countermeasures. The first major phase is off the shelf anti-bug stuff, like fly strips, deployed throughout the three-room motel room. The second major phase wraps everything in aluminum foil while they deploy bug zappers to light the place.

The visuals are probably one of the reasons that the audiences surveyed for Cinemascore hated the film so much: they’re intentionally ugly and they get worse as the film goes on. The seediness of the hotel is replaced by this sterile but deeply uncomfortable vision where light is purple rather than yellow or white and our two main characters are increasingly covered in sores and scabs. It’s simply not a pleasant thing to look at, reminding me of the conscious visual choices that Terry Gilliam made in Tideland.

Another aspect that probably turned off audiences was that the line between reality and paranoid delusion completely dissolves at some point. The film is presented in a rather straight-forward way, but the actual actions are surrealist in nature. This feels like an artifact of the screenwriter also being the writer of the play, Tracy Letts, finding no way to modify the delivery of this from the very objective view of an audience in a theater to the more subjective nature of filmmaking, with Friedkin just professionally shooting what’s on the page.

I think this objective approach to the final major section of the film, including when a mysterious Dr. Sweet (Brian O’Byrne) shows up to try and convince Agnes to give up Peter, is the largest issue with the film. I mean, it’s an ugly film through and through, but I’m willing to give it credit for wallowing in the ugliness well. Except that here, there’s this disconnect between how the paranoid delusions are being presented, mostly in rapid-fire dialogue, and how an audience in a film is supposed to be absorbing it. Essentially, this is delivering paranoia in a stage play format on the big screen. I don’t think it actually works in getting the audience involved. It’s very distancing and doesn’t feel convincing or involving.

Instead of feeling like this all could be real, I get nothing but that these people are crazy, and that’s not the most compelling thing to deliver to an audience.

Still, the film isn’t worthless. The acting is really quite good, especially from Judd who has a quiet moment where she has to describe her past that’s very compelling. Shannon, who originated the role of Peter on the stage, is convincing as a completely insane person, so we’ve got that going for us. The supporting cast is largely just there to act in support (duh), but they’re competent, especially Connick Jr. who has a certain terror to him that works.

So, I don’t think it works. It’s ugly, comes to pretty much no point (paranoid delusions are bad, I guess), and doesn’t actually feel like it uses the tools of cinema to drive its point home. This isn’t like adapting a more straight-forward drama like 12 Angry Men, this is an attempt, on the stage, to do something different, something that cinema has the tools to do in its own way that the film version makes no real effort to utilize. Out of all of Friedkin’s direct adaptations of stage plays, I think this is the one that fails most fully.

Rating: 1/4