Downloading Nancy
Movie Review
"Downloading Nancy"
Review by Eric D. Snider
Grade: F
Rating: Not Rated
Released: Friday, June 5, 2009
Directed by:
Cast:
Making a movie takes time, effort, energy, and money. While watching "Downloading Nancy," I kept thinking: Why would you go to all that trouble just to make something so ugly?
Not that all movies have to be happy and upbeat, of course. But good "down" movies have a reason for their darkness. There's a catharsis, or a commentary on the human condition, or something the audience can recognize as being true or insightful or meaningful.
"Downloading Nancy" is just ugly. It's loathsome, vile, depraved, and classless. It fails to pass the "why would anyone want to watch this?" test. Even viewers who can handle some uncomfortable subject matter or bleak themes want a payoff, some point to it all. (And yes, at times that payoff can simply be that the film is grotesquely amusing, as in the so-called "torture porn" genre.) "Downloading Nancy" has none of that.
Shot on the cheap with garish lighting and snuff-film sets (even a therapist's office looks suspiciously like the den of someone's house), the film is about a woman named Nancy (Maria Bello) who has gone off to meet a stranger she found on the Internet. Her husband, a cold-fish entrepreneur named Albert (Rufus Sewell), believes she is visiting friends in Baltimore. He claims to be worried when he doesn't hear from her for a couple days, but his behavior is awfully blasé for a frantic husband.
Through flashbacks, we learn that Nancy has been seeing a therapist (Amy Brenneman) to discuss the trauma of her childhood, where she was raped and otherwise harmed by her uncle. Her psychological issues have turned her into a raving nutcase, child-like one minute, disturbingly "adult" the next. She enjoys only aberrant sex, preferably involving pain and humiliation. And now she is meeting Louis (Jason Patric) to achieve the ultimate high (read: low).
First-time director Johan Renck, working from a brain-dead screenplay by first-timers Pamela Cuming and Lee Ross, shoves his brave actors through the paces without a shred of humanity. Maria Bello deserves praise for letting herself be as unglamorous and dejected as she appears in the film's squirmier scenes, yet the dialogue scenes are often laughably trashy and shopworn.
"You can change your mind if you want," Louis says.
"What, are you losing your [erection] already?" Nancy replies. "I came here to do this."
I'm sorry -- did someone sit on the remote control and change the channel to Cinemax?
Through it all -- the abuse, the violence, the sexual deviance -- Renck never achieves anything real. Ironically, in his arduous, sweaty attempt to be "provocative," what he does instead is make something transparent and fake. There is no one in the film for us to like, relate to, sympathize with, or root for, or even anyone who seems like he or she is supposed to inspire such a reaction. The movie has no value whatsoever, not as drama, not as shock cinema, and certainly not as an honest examination of real problems.
Grade: F
Not rated, probably R for a lot of harsh profanity, plenty of blood, violence, nudity, and aberrant behavior
1 hr., 32 min.
Copyright © Eric D. Snider.
This work may not be transmitted via the Internet, nor reproduced in any other way, without written consent from Eric D. Snider.
This item has 10 comments
January 26, 2009 at 7:19 pm
i think this is one of the sloppiest reviews i've read in a while.
i haven't seen this movie yet, but you seem to be unbelievably closeminded about it. BOO, YOU SUCK.
January 27, 2009 at 5:08 pm
@ b:
Hey, did you hear the one about the pot and the kettle?
...no, I guess not.
May 31, 2009 at 12:35 pm
As usual, Rufus Sewell is playing "the bad guy," although from the clips I've seen, I'd say good riddance to old Nanc. The guy needs a new agent.
June 3, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Your rating was exactly what most of the other critiques said: F, one star, the like. But your comment about this not being an honest examination of real problems struck me. Being a suicidal maschocist isn't a problem that is "real?" Neither is surviving the trauma of rape? I think that Nancy's problem is especially prevalent in America Today, to use one of those vague cliches that envelopes all happenings in society. Maybe because the content of this hits kind of close to home, but I'd say that it had a theme, characters that I could relate to, and a definite tie to reality. I'd also say this movie delivered in the shock genre.
Or maybe you just have to be a vulgar, angsty person with a coarse sense of values to enjoy this kind of movie.
The lighting did suck. And the sex scenes were trashy and unprovocative. And I did sit in a fetal position and rock back and forth several hours after the movie was over.
Hey, whatever floats your boat.
June 5, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Carmellita, you've missed something very important here. Maybe it's an effect of the several hours of rocking. Eric is saying that suicidal tendencies and rape or whatever else happens in the movie are real problems. They are serious problems, which I'm sure any sentient being would recognize. The point of what he said is that the movie does not treat these real problems in a real, honest way.
June 8, 2009 at 8:01 am
I guess Eric just can't enjoy useless trash.
June 8, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Sounds to me (and obviously, this is just a first impression after reading the review) like someone just wanted to make a bad version of Haneke's the Pianist. Like... take the S&M bits, but throw out the complex emotions and relationships. Why somebody would choose to do so, I have no idea.
June 11, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Really quite astonishing that Eric would be accused of being "unbelievably closeminded" by a reviewer because he didn't like the movie. And of course, it was a movie the reviewer hadn't even seen! I guess if you criticize anything graphically sexual or violent, you're a narrow-minded bigot--at least to the closed minds of certain narrow-minded bigots, such as the critical reviewer above.
July 14, 2009 at 10:21 am
it always amazes me that people don't want to see the darker side of the human phyic and that some people live in a rose colored world. the most disterbibg factor is that some poeple don't want to admit that these things do exsist. and by giving a trashy review that it's a form of wishing away the darker side of the sexuality they to seem to find discusing. i amsorry that you have never delved into the mind may i sugest a class in phy 101
November 21, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Perhaps, Doreen, you should consider taking some english classes along with those "phyic" classes.
I find it very interesting that so many people, especially of the high school/college demographic, seem to think that if you're not wallowing in the bleak despair of the dark side of humanity, then you are "living in a rose-colored world" and denying that anything bad exists. One could turn that argument back on you, that you are living in a dark world and living in denial that there is anything good in the world.