Wilde Maus

I didn't know anything about the film, hadn't even seen a trailer. So I made a bet with a friend before seeing the film: "Guess it's about Hader playing a pathetic yet friendly loser struggling with his life, but after all he makes it, and the ending will be hopeful, but still pessimistic." Guess what? I won. Hader is doing the Hader thing. This time he even wrote and directed the Hader thing himself. It is fun to watch, but it is hardly re-imaging what Hader could be. I hope the next time he will step out of his comfort zone and try something truly different.

You get the basic setting of the plot after 20 minutes and even if the story tries to surprise you it is predictable. Few nice one liners, few nice shots but too long, too thin, too flat.

Thank goodness for a well-crafted, old-fashioned comedy with sensible editing, excellent performances and a witty plot structure. "Wild Mouse" is a truly humorous, enjoyable movie. With gentle satire, the pathos of our human foibles is shown with finely drawn relationships. Although there is a likeness with Woody Allen's schemes here nobody is driven over the edge into extreme violence and tragedy. The main protagonists are Georg, who for years has been an erudite but somewhat snobbish and fierce classical music critic and his wife, a psychotherapist and counselor who at 43 has a belated desire to become pregnant. However, all their efforts have been fruitless, causing bilateral blaming and stress which she is unable to address despite her proficiency in such matters. Meanwhile, with the media business in decline Georg is made redundant but does not have the nerve to tell her. Instead he pretends going to work whilst helping an old school chum to run a fair ground roller-coaster, the 'Wild Mouse'. At the same time, he is taking feeble revenge on the chief editor who fired him by vandalizing his car. Then the story gets more complicated and comical… The film's characters are cocooned within their own preconceptions and limitations, as well as being trapped and pushed by work and social expectations, but they are not fundamentally malicious. Exasperated by such pressures they might however, act irrationally and get themselves into a 'spot of trouble' with some hilariously funny outcomes. I liked 'Wild Mouse' a lot and left the cinema smiling, whilst feeling quite reflective and slightly sad too. I'd rate it four out of five or a little more.

Like the Wilde Maus, the name of a Roller Coaster in Vienna's 19th century amusement park Prater, life can be a hell of a ride with a lot of unexpected turns and ups and downs along its way. In this sense the name of the movie already tells us what is going to happen to the main protagonist Georg and his life in the about 100 minutes of the movies's run-time. Georg, however, is not merely a helpless passenger but is steering his cart with an astonishing certainty in always steeper turns at any possibility.

Revenge can be a sweet thing, especially if you don't know what else to do with your sudden gained spare time after having been sacked as a renown music critic for cost reduction reasons. So next to helping an old school mate to get an old roller coaster up and running, Georg starts his personal vendetta against his German ex-boss, whom he sees responsible for him being laid off. The vendetta starts with a rather innocent making scratches into the enemy's car, continues to graffiti spraying on the enemy's house and ends in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to shoot the self-appointed enemy.

Georg's inability to deal with the new situation in a proper manner certainly make the tragic element of the movie but his failure is also so lunatic that it is great comedy at the same time. See him reading his newspaper on a daily basis in the amusement park while pretending to his girlfriend of still going to work, see him becoming a business partner of someone that used to bully him in school and see him sitting in a perfect snow landscape only in underpants after all has gone wrong.

There is also a lot of comic elements in the movie's side stories, in which it is mostly aspects of modern lifestyle and political hypercorrectness, which are being made fun of. Many of these things are actually quite hard to tell, be it for their bluntness or be it for their subtlety. Anyway, Georg's girlfriend Johanna, a psychotherapist, is definitely also a character, one should not miss. Despite a lot of relationship problems and her not responded wishing for a baby, she eventually turns out to be the perfect match to Georg, although the rather open ending does not state this very clearly. It is rather my interpretation thereof ...

The acting is quite convincing, although it is hard to tell, how much the dubbing will take away from its original local charm. Of course, Josef Hader, originally a stand-up comedian, is just playing one more time himself, a grumpy and sarcastic middle aged man, who is unable or unwilling to cope with many aspects of modern life.