Buzzard is a simple story told in a string of blackout scenes.
People talk. They eat. Sometimes they hit each other. Blackout. Next scene
comes up. And so on. Godard used to do it this way. So did Jim Jarmusch. It’s a
nice style, and it can be effective, especially when you’re depicting characters
who are, shall we say, smaller than life.
The movie’s hero (or ‘anti-hero’) is Marty Jackitansky (Joshua Burge), a touchy young guy who works
a temp job at a mortgage company. When we first see him he’s closing out his
checking account so he can take advantage of a new $50-dollar offer from the
same bank to open a new account. He’s kind of a prick, and he knows it.
Never meeting a scam he doesn’t like, Marty eventually gets
his hands on some old company checks and signs them over to himself, which seems
like an easy way to get quick money. When he learns his crime is easily
traceable by the firm, he grows paranoid.
Thinking his shabby apartment will be surrounded by cops and
surveillance cameras, he hides out in the basement of a co-worker. They bicker
and get on each other’s nerves. When the
stress of hiding out becomes too much, he snaps and assaults his friend. Then he
hits the streets, hoping to lay low until the coast is clear.
The second part of the movie is decidedly grimmer than the
first. Using his native ability to scam
people, Marty manages to stay in hotels for a while, but they become increasingly
smaller and grimier as his money runs out. We eventually see him scavenging from
dumpsters, like the buzzard of the movie’s title. He turns to violence, which
isn’t a surprise, since he’s such a hothead. He wants to be a rebel, but he’s
not sure what he’s rebelling against. He rails against corporate America, but if
you asked him why corporate America was bad, he probably couldn’t tell
you. It’s just a notion he probably
heard on one of his heavy metal albums.
The world of Buzzard
is an indistinct grey, the sort of bland cityscape you see in comic books and
graphic novels. It supposedly takes place
in Detroit, but you wouldn’t know it. The
time period, too, is a mystery. There
are references to Soundgarden, and the characters seem mangy enough to have
existed at any time during the past two decades. There are no mobile phones,
and no references to apps or the internet.
Maybe it takes place in the 1990s. I don’t know. All that is clear is that the people around Marty seem unbearably stupid and
self-absorbed. It’s no wonder he feels
no guilt about ripping people off. Bank tellers seem robotic. Store clerks seem smug. To blow ‘em all up would seem a reasonable
conclusion for a guy like Marty.
While the movie may remind me of an early Jarmusch, this is
only in reference to its style. The characters in Jarmusch, for instance, were
adults, with adult behavior. They gambled, they liked sports, they occasionally thought about women. In Buzzard,
the characters have jobs, but they’re still playing with plastic Star Wars
swords, and living in their parents’ basement. Marty, for all of his anger and frustration,
is a nerd, too. Even in a dire moment, he doesn’t mind explaining the
difference between Bigfoot and the Florida Skunk Ape. He even builds a glove
that resembles the one worn by Freddy in Nightmare
on Elm Street. He wears monster masks out in public. Here’s a guy on the run from the law, yet
rather than remain inconspicuous, he’s
so dumb that he wears masks and a giant glove with blades. Then again, he’s so used to going through
life unnoticed that he probably can’t imagine anyone seeing him, even with a rubber
mask on.
I liked Joshua Burge as Marty. He looks like Buster Keaton,
sounds like Donald Sutherland, and is always a click away from doing some
damage. Writer/director Joel Potrykus even
has the chutzpah to put Marty in a dark movie theater, peering through the
blades of his Freddy glove, looking exactly like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, waiting for the explosion
to come. Is this a conscious move? An
homage, like Godard dressing his French actors like Bogart? Or a warning that
even our nerds will become dangerous? Marty
would usually be played for laughs as a supporting character in another story. Here, he’s front and center. And he’s fascinating. I especially loved the long scene, shot in
one delirious take, where he sits in a
hotel room eating a plate of spaghetti and watching TV. He stuffs his mouth
with such animal pleasure that he finally seems, with his hotel robe and
slippers, like a king in his castle.
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