Life Is Short: Of Biblical Proportions

Life Is Short is an as-needed series documenting the films we just couldn't make it through. We like to refer to these movies as "Damsels in Distress." Previous entries can be found here. 

Title: THE SON OF JOSEPH
Running Time: 113 MIN
Elapsed Time at Plug Pull: 40 MIN
Portion Watched: 35%
My Age at Time of Viewing: 55 YRS, 1 MO.
Average Male American Lifespan: 76.7 YRS.
Watched/Did Instead: Went to bed and read from Elvis Costello's memoirs.
Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 100-1

My first foray into the work of Eugene Green did not go well. I meant to see "La Sapienza" a few years ago, and that might have softened me up for this arch, oblique morality play about a high school boy hunting down his biological father.

Actors robotically exchange lines made up of unnaturally simple declarative sentences. Characters pile up -- for example at an antiseptic cocktail party -- without a way to discern which ones we need to care about. Mathieu Amalric ("Chicken With Plums") and Maria de Medeiros ("Pulp Fiction") seem wasted.

An example of clunky dialogue includes the boy, Vincent, interacting with a hotel clerk. When Vincent tells the man that he arrived early because he wanted to make sure he wasn't late for his appointment, the clerk turns oracular: "If you're on time for your appointments, young man, you'll never succeed in life." OK. This one shares too many annoying qualities (French quirk) with the films of Bruno Dumont, the king of trying one's patience. For reasons that presumably become clear eventually, chapter headings are borrowed from books of the Bible.

This supposedly has a killer ending. Maybe I should have made this our third entry in Fast Forward Theater. I just didn't have what it takes.