Subtitles : Vengeance (2022)

Storyline

The new film, Vengeance, will avenge your empty feelings about vacuous summer blockbusters. It is neither a blockbuster nor simple. It's a bit of film noir, appropriately set in West Texas, a black comedy laced with questions about how we create our self-identity and how we deal with cultural influences that shape our images. It will stimulate you to sit on your summer patio and talk endlessly about the film's meanings while some tequila makes it all go down gently.Vengeance, written, directed and produced by The Office's B J Novak, who played Ryan, has less to do with catching the murderer of Ben Manalowitz's (Novak) brief girlfriend, Abby (Lio Tipton), than NY-City Ben as stranger in a remote town, whose values are not his. As the outsider in an arid land where sophistication long ago adopted the good-old-boy ethic (it is not SXSW), Ben tries to find his way to truth about Abby's death and please his editor Eloise (Issa Rae), only to find that his own ignorance keeps the truth at bay.Although Abby's brother, Ty (Boyd Holbrook), enlists Ben to help avenge her murder, Ben allows that vengeance is not in his wheelhouse. Finally agreeing to the hunt, Ben is barely aware that of his original indifference to her death and his lack of sympathy for Texans and their culture, so different from his liberal-leaning NE. Novak skillfully roams around the differences between blue and red statesIgnoring the evidence that she overdosed, Ben is lost in contemporary disinformation, part of which he's helped foster over the years. In the course of his investigation, it becomes apparent his New-York-based podcast and his writing for The New Yorker could play a part in his growing lack of objectivity. He realizes reporting on Abby's death will be a boon to his media persona, affection for her long-gone and hard to reinvent. That her death might have been from an overdose is a liability to a much juicier homicide, creating a false truth in a modern world tuned in to false news. As for the self-record that remains after we die, damn the truth and do our own existential creating.Ben's ambitions are a block to understanding a culture that embraces guns and opioids. Abby's participation in the latter skewers Ben's investigation and affects his embracing a culture that allows overdose. His very act of reporting on a culture he does not know, even though he has barged in on it, is symptomatic of a media out of truth control.False news, indulgence in opioids, and the selfish co-opting of a culture are not restricted to visiting West Texas. I hope B J Novak will bring us more truth wrapped in small stories both amusing and instructive.