No
matter how much it asserts its feminist bona fides, this film will always be
considered rightwing—and with some justification. It is highly debatable what
Murphy Brown might think of Sadie, an abuse survivor who frequently takes the
law into her own hands, but Dirty Harry would approve of the intention (but not
always the execution, so to speak). Sadie will deliver some frontier justice to
abusive husbands and mothers alike in Sarah Dagger-Nickson’s A Vigilante, which opens this Friday in New
York.
Sadie
has found her purpose defending the innocent, yet she will never truly be free
until she faces up to the husband who terrorized her. Inconveniently, he is
missing, but presumably not dead. We will see her intervene on behalf of
several clients, while searching for the disappearing deadbeat.
And
that is pretty much it. Daggar-Nickson is clearly more interested in Sadie as a
character under stress than as an action figure, but her screenplay is still
quite stark and spare, especially when it comes to those extravagant plot
points. Nevertheless, she throws in some temporal gamesmanship to needlessly
confuse the timeline. A Vigilante is
not You Were Never Really Here, but
it is surprisingly close, stylistically.
Regardless,
Olivia Wilde does some of her best work probably ever as Sadie. She de-glams
and goes largely non-verbal throughout her viscerally intense performance. In
fact, only Tonye Patano manages not to whither next to her as Sadie’s support
group leader. Problematically, that is especially true of Morgan Spector, who
turns out to ne a big nothing as her husband.
Daggar-Nickson
walks an exasperatingly fine line. Clearly, she refuses to indulge in the
baser, cathartic impulses of traditional grindhouse revenge movies. As one
might expect, by standing in the middle and refusing to make a choice, she
still sets a tone for the film. Thanks to Wilde, it isn’t bad, but it should
have much more visceral pop to it. It is not terrible, but it is definitely a
missed opportunity.
Frustratingly,
it is not recommended for those who will be most interested in a film titled, A Vigilante. For Wilde’s fans primarily,
it opens this Friday (3/29) in New York, at the Cinema Village.
