Reviewed: The Paperboy

So take off all your clothes.

The Paperboy
dir: Lee Daniels

Pedro Almodóvar spent around a decade trying to make an adaptation of The Paperboy, Pete Dexter’s seamy novel about sex, race and murder in 1960s Florida. The version that is now seeing the light of the day is by the African-American director Lee Daniels. Anyone who saw Daniels’s last film, Precious, may worry that this represents an intolerable downgrading. An announcement that King Lear will be played in tonight’s performance by Michael Barrymore rather than Michael Gambon could be expected to prompt a stampede for refunds. But Daniels turns out to be the ideal director for a film about the tendency of desire to turn sane minds to guacamole.

In Precious, Daniels brought to the story of a sexually abused Brooklyn teenager an inappropriate prurience. But even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day and Daniels’s overheated style has met its ideal subject in The Paperboy. The spine of the film is a fairly conventional legal drama: a gogetting reporter, Ward Jansen (Matthew Mc- Conaughey), helped by his kid brother Jack (Zac Efron), becomes convinced he can save from death row Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack), whose conviction for the killing of a sheriff appears to be unsound. But just as none of the characters can be bothered with the murder investigation in Gosford Park, so it becomes apparent that no one in The Paperboy gives a hoot about anything not related to sex. This movie is in heat.

The lightning rod for lust in the picture is Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), a vision in baby-pink dress, vanilla hair and bluebottle eyeshadow; one of those femmes de lettres who deploys her skills writing come-ons to convicted killers. Hillary, a drooling, handcuffed slab of lard with a libido, is the man of Charlotte’s warped dreams. The gag of the scene in which he is wheeled out to meet his advocates, and the joke of the entire film, is that everyone has the hots for everyone else. Charlotte and Hillary are moaning orgasmically throughout what is intended to be a sober briefing. Jack is going gooey at the sight of Charlotte. As for Ward, who’s your average repressed, gay masochist –well, no, that isn’t a root vegetable in his pocket and, yes, he is extraordinarily pleased to see everyone.

A solitary bucket of cold water is provided by the Jansens’ maid, Anita, played by the singer Macy Gray. You’d have to add several hundred extra “e”s to “sleepy” to evoke Gray’s vocal delivery accurately, but it’s just what the movie needs: Anita is the outsider here, not only racially and economically but in her abstinence from the movie’s delirium. It’s right that she should narrate the story in the form of an interview she is giving some years later but it would make even more sense if she didn’t realise she was providing a movie voiceover: “Anyhoo, I think y’all seen enough,” she says, as a sex scene is faded out.

The Paperboy sticks to its guns and shows that no good can come of a life steered by areas of the body other than the heart and mind. But one feels disinclined to take such advice from a director who gets this excited over a shot of Charlotte urinating on Jack. That Jack has been stung by jellyfish, and Charlotte is attempting to alleviate his suffering, does nothing to diminish the episode’s sexual charge. Though at least the scene gives Kidman –who is having the time of her life here – the chance to deliver lines marinated in camp. “If anyone’s gonna piss on him, it’s gonna be me!” she rages at a bunch of sunbathers. “He don’t like strangers peeing on him!”

Nor does the film stint on slavering closeups of Zac Efron: Zac swims, Zac towels off, Zac broods endlessly beneath the canopy of his magnificent eyebrows. Chances are he isn’t mulling over the question: “Does my bum look big in this?” Because it doesn’t. His bum looks amazing in that. When Tom Cruise performed his career-making dance in Risky Business, his underwear was referred to as “tighty-whities”, but he may as well have been Hattie Jacques in her bloomers next to Efron. There. You see how the fever of The Paperboy gets to you? I’ve just written an entire paragraph about Zac Efron’s underpants. And you’ve read it.