BUG (2006)
This review may contain spoilers.
I know this has its ardent fans, but I couldn't quite get on board with it. Friedkin's direction is fine, but Tracy Letts's script has an overweening fascination with the most colorful and lurid manifestations of paranoid schizophrenia—now, sure, I had the same fascination when I was an 18-year-old with a transgressive streak, but I've long since grown out of it. And having Agnes sort of "catch" Peter's schizophrenia like it's a contagion just doesn't land right for me. [Either she's voluntarily "opting in" to sharing Peter's delusions out of fear of losing him (we hear a lot about her loneliness), or she has her own latent schizophrenic tendencies that get "triggered" by her proximity to Peter—neither option strikes me as great screenwriting or good psychology.] Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon are the saving grace here, though, turning in strong performances which humanize these characters and make them more sympathetic than they've been written to be.
None of this is to say you can't make a good movie about mental illness, or even a good movie about paranoid schizophrenia—Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven (1993) comes to mind as a less sensationalist, more solemn treatment of this kind of material, while still containing some ghastly transgressive sequences.
jbushnell
