Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #154 Somebody is Waiting (1996)

You’d never imagine a movie with this exciting of a video box would be boring, but it is!

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

It says a lot about the film careers of Kitaen and Gayheart that some of their movies never made the jump from VHS to Blu-Ray or DVD and are not available to stream legally anywhere. On Monday I wrote about one such deserved obscurity, the grim, joyless revenge thriller Marine Issue AKA Instant Justice AKA The Madrid Connection. 

Now I’m writing about another too-obscure-for-the-modern era bit of cinematic ephemera, the dour 1996 youth gone wild melodrama Somebody is Waiting. 

The trailers for big mainstream movies generally work overtime to create the illusion that the popcorn flicks that they are advertising offer nothing but explosive thrills and non-stop excitement, a non-stop parade of climaxes and big moments. 

The trailers for arthouse films, in sharp contrast, generally do the opposite. They perversely go out of their way to create the impression that NOTHING happens in them, just a lot of quiet, sad moments involving doleful, melancholy lost souls staring mournfully into the distance. 

Somebody is Waiting is prototypical arthouse fare, a true Sundance movie even if it never actually played the famous film festival. In my former life as a professional film critic I spent a lot of time at Sundance and with Sundance movies. 

Sundance is a deceptively safe, supportive, insanely enthusiastic space for the kind of painfully earnest, pretentious fare that doesn’t have a chance with mainstream audiences that wants entertainment, escape and distraction rather than bleary wallows in the depths of human misery. 

Somebody is Waiting is a SERIOUS movie about SERIOUS subjects like youthful alienation, grief, mourning, divorce, alcoholism and death. It doesn’t just afford its cast an act but rather to ACT, to EMOTE, to be true ARTISTS and feel things intensely. 

Writer-director Martin Donovan more specifically wants desperately to make a contemporary Rebel Without a Cause about an angsty young man at war with a corrupt adult world full of hypocrites and fakes. 

Johnny Whitworth stars as Leon, the film’s James Dean figure, an eighteen year old with tragic 1990s hair who copes poorly with his parents’ divorce and his father’s abandonment by drinking too much, running with the wrong crowd and engaging in symbolic acts of mindless destruction.

When one of these boozy stunts lands Leon in jail his loving but firm mother Charlotte (Natassja Kinski) tells him to leave the house he shares with his many brothers and sisters. 

To help him with his new life as an adult she takes Leon to the bank to open an account. In a wildly out of place flurry of of Cannon-style super action, Leon is taken hostage by a band of bank robbers and then Charlotte, in a misplaced burst of maternal protectiveness, runs out to confront the kidnappers/bank robbers, at which point she is machine-gunned to death in the street. 

So soulful! So Irish!

Charlotte’s bloody demise would feel more at home in Death Wish III than an earnest drama about alienated kids. It’s as if 95 percent of the script was written by an ambitious, arty Charles Kaufman type who let his sleazy brother Donald pinch-hit and write the scene where the loving mother dies by getting machine gunned by random bad guys we never see again. 

Leon wakes up after fifteen days of fading in and out of consciousness to the bad news that his beloved mother his dead. Whitworth’s father Roger is played by Gabriel Byrne, who is drearily typecast here as the stock Gabriel Byrne character: an intensely depressed, alcoholic Irishman with sad eyes and a sad face and a sad life and under-realized artistic ambitions. 

From the many wistful home movie flashbacks to happier times we’re treated to, it seems like Roger has always been a terrible, alcoholic husband and an even worse father. Charlotte’s death affords Roger a second chance to be the father and stand-up man he utterly failed to be the first time around. 

Roger wastes no time blowing the opportunity tragedy and fate have given him. He drinks way too much, brings a sexual conquest in the home who doesn’t appear to be much older than his teenage sons and alienates his offspring by firing the family’s loyal longtime nanny (Shirley Knight, in yet another role unworthy of her). 

When Roger tries to drunkenly assert himself with Leon, his resentful son pushes him away ever so lightly, and Roger tumbles backwards and dies immediately. Leon clearly didn’t do anything wrong but he freaks the fuck out nonetheless and goes on the lamb. 

Somebody is Waiting is one of those hokey movies where the news that a lead character is on the run from the police shows up on every television he passes, although it’d have to be an awfully slow news day for an eighteen year old accidentally killing his unknown dad to dominate nightly newscasts. 

Leon begins the film with his adolescent angst turned all the way up to 10. Then life and the screenplay conspire to make his already shitty life almost comically grim. Whitworth narrates the proceedings in a portentous mumble that has become lazy shorthand for pummeling teen intensity.

As a trauma-plagued teen coming of age in a bleak world Whitworth is perfectly fine. Serviceable. Adequate. Alas, Somebody is Waiting needs something much, much, much more than fine. In order for this to be anything other than pretentious nonsense, Whitworth needs to be James Dean. He needs to be Marlon Brando. He needs to at least be Christian Slater. He needs to be so charismatic and so magnetic that we can’t look away. That most assuredly is not Whitworth. 

In one of her first film roles, Gayheart is similarly perfectly adequate as Leon’s concerned girlfriend but she isn’t Natalie Wood any more than Whitworth is a Clinton-era James Dean. 

It speaks to how little the film engaged me that I spent most of it recoiling in horror at the fashion and hairstyles. Everybody here seems to wear the mid-1990s uniform of jeans, and a colored tee-shirt under a flannel with sheepdog hair. Why did we ever think that looked good? Why did we look down on the fashions of the 1980s and 1970s when they’re objectively so much better and more enduring than our abysmal fashion?

Like a true Sundance movie, Somebody is Waiting takes itself VERY seriously. It desperately wants to be high art. Instead it’s just full of itself, a morose melodrama with a lot to offer its actors in terms of big scenes and moody monologues and next to nothing to offer audiences. 

Marine Issue was at least preceded on home video by trailers for Lethal Weapon and Over the Top. Somebody is Waiting also has trailers but they’re for movies so dreary and interchangeable that I forgot them almost immediately. 

Somebody is Waiting is equally unmemorable. It wants very badly to be Rebel Without a Cause. Instead it’s just very bad, a wispy little nothing without a point or a clue. 

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