Super Sucker
Super Sucker, the second indie comedy feature written and directed by actor Jeff Daniels, is a terrible movie. But that doesn’t prevent it from being interesting and even admirable as a grassroots phenomenon. I haven’t seen its predecessor, Escanaba in da Moonlight (2001)–based on Daniels’s play, which he produced at his own 160-seat theater in Chelsea, Michigan, the Purple Rose (named after the Woody Allen movie The Purple Rose of Cairo, which Daniels has cited as a turning point in his career). The movie version of Escanaba passed through Chicago at some point and received a listing but not a review in this paper. In fact, Escanaba received few reviews anywhere (although the making of the film was the subject of an article in Harper’s in late 2000). The longest notice appeared in the Detroit News, whose Tom Long wrote that the film “is decidedly a Michigan experience, and there are questions as to how it will fly in lands that know nothing of the Mackinac Bridge, pasties, and the Department of Natural Resources.” But the film’s regional appeal was confirmed by its box office figures for Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota: in those three states alone, the film recouped its $1.8 million production budget and netted a half million dollars to boot.
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Super Sucker brings to mind several other comedies–Farrelly brothers farces like Dumb and Dumber (which starred Daniels), Bob Balaban’s lesser-known Parents, and Adam Sandler movies like Happy Gilmore and the recent Punch-Drunk Love. A cat swallowed and shredded by a vacuum cleaner is a standard-issue Farrelly hoot; the leering wide-angle close-up is a favorite device of Balaban’s. And the abidingly dopey hero prone to explosions of rage is pure Sandler. But the film’s primary inspiration is clearly Robert Zemeckis’s Used Cars–especially in its celebration of the sleazy maneuvers perpetrated in the name of bloodthirsty professional competition. Zemeckis’s is the better film, thanks to the director’s superior technical proficiency and Rube Goldberg-like gift for articulating complex gags–not to mention the depth, honesty, and consistency of his mean-spiritedness.
