The Paint Job

"Paint Job" is a wry,black comedy about a painter who pursues his boss's wife.his boss as it turns out is a serial killer in their small town.this movie is amusing at times,always entertaining and always bizarre the film is populated with an assortment of quirky(to say the least)characters.in fact there is no one in the film who can be described as normal.Wil Patton is Wesley,the painter who falls for his boss's wife.Bebe Neuwirth plays the wife,and Robert Pastorelli plays the boss/serial killer.the movie is subtle in its humour,more ironic than anything,and absurd at times.i particularly liked Neuwirth's performance as the somewhat dim wife,although all the performances were good.i did not have any expectations going in,so was pleasantly surprised at how effective and entertaining the film was.if you expect to be rolling around in hysterics,look elsewhere.otherwise,prepare to be amused and entertained. a strong 6/10

These fads get going somehow. An original movie makes money and the board room full of MBAs get together and try to figure out how quickly they can imitate it. In 1975 it was "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", the first "cult movie." It was an original and was shortly followed by a couple of films that deliberately tried to cash in on its cult aspects. They weren't underground cult movies, mind you, but they faked the same qualities. "Platoon" hit a nerve too, the first movie the Suits dared to endorse that dealt with the horrors of Viet Nam. Several others followed. David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" was startlingly original too and its influence showed up all over the place. There was even a skin flick version of it, with some fat hairy guy munching on a strip of blue velvet belt while doing unspeakable things to somebody else. Then there was "Saving Private Ryan," and "Band of Brothers" and "Wind Talkers" and the rest, showing an excess of misery and much delightful gore.

"The Paint Job" followed "Blue Velvet" by a few years and it shows. The story is filled with gratuities and non sequiturs. Somebody is in a shop staring at the street through the plate glass window. Half a dozen men pass down the sidewalk carrying the legs of mannequins (or prosthetic devices or something) upside down -- a small forest of plastic feet. They stop at the window for a moment, one of them taps on the glass with a phony foot, then they walk away. What does it mean, you ask? I don't know. What is the meaning of life? Why can't we remove that dammed tab from the mattress without being arrested? Why does hail always have to be the size of something else?

The dialogue is just as quirky. Will Patton, a small-town house painter, falls in love with his boss's wife. He sits at a table in a bar with his boss and two fellow painters. Patton: "You ever been in love?" Colleague: "Oh, yes. It's too much to go through except every three or four years." Boss: "It hurts in the back of the neck." Patton: "I think I got it bad." Colleague: "Get rid of it. Go to a movie -- but only a movie that's got "blood" or "death" in the title. Then you come out and do something real intricate, maybe build a geodesic dome. Otherwise she's going to get to you somehow." Boss: "Oh, yeah. He sticks his tongue in your ear and that's it." {Long pause while no one looks at the boss, then...] Colleague: "Huh?" Something like that.

The story itself is just as illogical. Patton's boss sounds like a nice, easy-going reasonable guy but Patton begins to think he may be a few clowns short of a circus so he begins to follow the boss around, lingering in the hallways of strange hotels and flophouses and listening to what goes on in the room the boss has just entered. He overhears his boss murdering some guy. So what does he do? Well -- you can be certain he doesn't run to the police. Instead, as time passes, he continues to follow his boss through alleys and up and down staircases and listening to yet more murders until the boss discovers what Patton's been doing and there is a slam-bang fight with cans of paint. I was grateful for one of the original touches. After Patton wallops his boss with a can and the boss collapses unconscious, or maybe dead, he does NOT leap up from the floor a minute later, full of vim and vigor.

The director has everyone play out this unlikely scenario by shuffling through it. People speak quietly, matter-of-factly. (Except for Bebe Neuwirth, the boss's wife, who's function in the plot is obscure as the plot itself.)

On the plus side, the acting is pretty good. The performers deliver their lines after rather long pauses, but they make them believable. Will Patton is especially admirable. He wears his usual look of wide-eyed wonder and it works here. Well, it works in ALL of his movies because underneath that layer of polite puzzlement he is able to insert some element of other things going on but not expressed -- jealousy, insanity, stupidity. He's been excellent in just about everything he's appeared in, a solid actor. And the production design is outstanding. The interior of those flop houses is out of your meanest nightmares.

Should you see this? Well, yeah, why not? It's slow at times but the dialogue is often funny. In addition the movie is an historical curiosity in its relationship to David Lynch. And that paint-can finish in which the rooms and people wind up looking like the results of some demonic coupling of the flags of Germany and Mexico.

The Paint Job is a peculiar hybrid; it could be characterized as a thriller, a rather odd romantic comedy, and as a romantic satire. And while I found this to be an unsettling mix--one was not always quite sure how to respond--my general take on the film was positive. The pacing was admittedly too slow at times, but the writing was quite strong, the performances of Ted Levine, Robert Pastorelli, Bebe Neuwirth, and Will Patton were first rate, and climactic battle was like no other I have ever seen

The Paint Job is filled with surprises. Writer/Director Taav creates a sexual landscape so fraught with suspicion and confusion that no character, no matter how well-meaning, and no action, no matter how benign, can be taken a face value. This is a wonderfully written, visually imaginative independent film that is alternately quite funny and quite frightening. Will Patton and Bebe Neuwirth are excellent as the mismatched lovers ; Ted Levine, in an uncredited role, is riotous; and the final confrontation between Patton and his boss, Robert Pastorelli, is startling and original. See it if you haven't, and see it again if you have.

Well, there is actually more available from that 1929 film, so this film's lot is worse. Only made in the 1990s, 25 years later it is an essentially "lost" film.

It is about a house painter who falls in love with the boss' wife (Bebe Neuwirth) - she plays a sexy though somewhat dim creature here. She is very ambivalent about what to do with her feelings. Meanwhile the painter is following his boss all over town at weird out of the way spots, and stumbles across something nefarious. Did I mention that the house painter lives in an underground bomb shelter in the boss' front yard? The thing is just so quirky. Many compare it to Blue Velvet, but it is much more blue collar than that, and made seven years after Blue Velvet it is too much of a late comer to be a rip off of that film.

The scene I remember - and even that is a little hazy - is that the house painter calls up some nighttime talk radio jock for advice. He starts talking about "problems with his neighbor" and gets accused of not liking immigrants and little kids from other countries! Confused by the retort, the painter hangs up on the shock jock. It was kind of a prescient peek into the army of shock jocks we have today.

If you ever come across this one give it a look. I think it was very original. Plus you get to see Bebe Neuwirth miles from her better known stiff and stern Lilith character on Cheers. There are only old used VHS copies of the film available. It is not available on demand, it was never on DVD, nor is there even a Wikipedia article about it! And there are Wikipedia articles about everything! Since it has probably never been digitized it will not turn up on cable. Here is one worthy of a Criterion release, just for the weirdness of it all.