Be Kind Rewind

"The past belongs to us, we can change it if we want."

Be Kind Rewind is alternately so whacked out as to be inaccessible, and so sweet and naïve as to be irresistible. Michel Gondry, who achieved notoriety through his collaborations with crazed genius Charlie Kaufman, has made a movie that believes to the bottom of its heart in the power of creativity to triumph in the face of corporate hegemony. That it’s weird, puzzling and occasionally inexplicable seems only appropriate. More than most people, I rebel against filmmakers who try to drown us in quirks and affectations. But this is a movie I want to hug.

The plot seems, admittedly, like a nightmare or a bad trip. In the working-class town of Passaic, NJ, two friends (Jack Black and Mos Def) mind a video store (“Be Kind Rewind”) that has not managed to transition from VHS to DVD. After an attempt to sabotage the local power plant goes badly awry, one of them becomes magnetized and destroys all the tapes. In order not to lose their most loyal customer (Mia Farrow), the two set about remaking the movies with their camcorder. Soon, all of Passaic lines up around the block to watch the shoestring “Sweded” versions of movies like Ghostbusters, The Lion King and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Gondry attacks this with a brazen anything-goes mentality, throwing out so many casual non sequiturs that at points he seems to be flailing wildly; I admit to longing for Charlie Kaufman, who would have somehow organized all the weirdness in such a way as to make perfect sense. But if Kaufman is a genius craftsman whose screenplays are incredible balancing acts, Gondry is a reckless visionary lost inside a bizarre world of his own creation — and that’s plenty interesting in its own right. I’m immensely grateful for the throwaway shot of Jack Black outfitting some poor lady’s car with what looked like enormous aluminum exhaust pipes (maybe jet engines?) because she had asked for “something sporty.”

Part of the reason all the whimsy is more endearing than annoying is that Gondry, despite his penchant for insane flights of fancy, is surprisingly patient. He has the fortitude to set up jokes in ways that are confounding at the time but that make perfect sense when the joke pays off later (e.g. the camouflage our heroes wear to invade the power plant). And the film’s main draw — the attempts to “Swede” big-budget Hollywood movies with a camcorder and whatever can be found in Passaic — is allowed to build momentum: it’s hard to make heads or tails of the characters’ initial attempt to remake Ghostbusters, but the gimmick culminates in an epic montage centerpiece that made me laugh harder than anything else so far this year.

Then there’s Be Kind Rewind‘s touching faith in creativity and community solidarity over soulless corporate power. I got the sense that Gondry didn’t care so much about VHS vs. DVD or analog vs. digital; the film didn’t seem particularly nostalgic. If anything, he’s tributing, in a roundabout way, the spirit of YouTube: the power of individuals to tell their own stories and captivate the world. Even changing history is not out of reach. Be Kind Rewind builds on this point to deliver, in its own strange way, a genuinely, even conventionally rousing climax.

“Quirky” these days seems to indicate snide and self-consciously “hip” — Wes Anderson and David O. Russell have co-opted the term. Be Kind Rewind is nothing like that; if anything, it’s too earnest. Don’t write it off as too indie and weird.

-- Eugene Novikov

Released:	2008
Starring:	Mia Farrow, Melonie Diaz, Mos Def, Jack Black, Danny Glover
Directed by:	Michel Gondry
Rated:	PG-13