Review: Lovely by Surprise (2009)

[Mark R. Leeper]

                       LOVELY BY SURPRISE
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: Newcomer writer/director/producer Kirt
     Gunn gives us a strange absurdist fantasy on
     the subject of the relation between an author
     and her characters.  Three stories are told
     simultaneously.  One is of an author, one of the
     characters she is writing about, and a third
     world seems to strangely link the other two.  The
     film is bizarre and at times touching, but in the
     end leaves the viewer perplexed and a little
     unsatisfied with the stories.  Rating: +1 (-4 to +4)
     or 6/10

It is frequently said by authors that their characters take on a
life of their own, and sometimes are even uncooperative.  LOVELY BY
SURPRISE is not the first fantasy in which a novelist creates
characters who will not cooperate with the author.  But this
fantasy is a little different because the relationship between
author Marian (played by Carrie Preston) and her characters Humkin
(Michael Chernus) and Mopekey (Dallas Roberts) is so enigmatically
set up.  In many ways Marian is totally at the mercy of her
fictions.  In many ways she is the weakest character of the film.
As she suffers from writer's block she goes for help from Jackson
(Austin Pendleton), her former writing professor and erstwhile
lover.  Jackson tells Marian that she has no choice but to kill her
main character.  How this could possibly work for Marian is
unclear, because in her story there are just two brothers who live
on a houseboat in the middle of a field.  Humkin and Mopekey live
like five and six-year-olds, running around in their underpants and
playing childish games.  Their only sustenance is milk and sugared
cereal inexplicably delivered to the houseboat.  Marion knows that
without Humkin she will have only Mopekey on a houseboat in the
middle of a field, and no story to tell.  She lets Jackson bully
her into trying to kill off Humkin in her story.  But by this point
Humkin has more power than Marian.

Meanwhile, in an apparently unrelated thread, Bob (Reg Rogers) is a
car salesman whose philosophy will not allow him to sell a car.  He
analyzes each of his potential customers and explains only too
accurately how they need something else in their lives more
important than a car.  ("Buying a car will not protect you from
evil.")  His empathy for his customers stands in the way of his
career.  Yet ironically, in his personal life widower Bob cannot
produce enough empathy to reach his six-year-old daughter, Mimi
(Lena Lamer), who has remained silent since she lost her mother.
Bob is a single character in both Humkin's world and in Marian's.
He is a thread linking the two worlds together with his own world
that intersects both.

Generally in fantasy film there is an underlying logic that
explains the rules by which the story works.  Writer/director Kirt
Gunn gives us a weakly structured film with no such simple
explanation of the rules.  Worlds and half-worlds just intersect
without explanation, as enigmatic as the houseboat in the field.
One rather expects a fully developed--if alien--world as we had in
I {HEART} HUCKABEES or the literary fantasy STRANGER THAN FICTION.
Kirt Gunn's world has logical contradictions that leave the viewer
wondering if Bob can be in the same world as both Humkin and
Marion, can't Marian and Humkin somehow get together?  Gunn seems
to want, as one of his characters says "to see things as they
absolutely are not.  With the possible exception of Bob, the
characters are not fully fleshed out.  The novelty of the world
gets in the way of character development.  This is not a fatal
flow, but it damages the effect of the final film.

Quirky but not really engaging, LOVELY BY SURPRISE is heavy on
surprise but light on lovely.  Neither the idea nor the characters
are fully satisfying.  I rate it a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or
6/10.

Film Credits: <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0760173/>


					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper at optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper