"Lonesome Jim" (2005) - Movie Review

Whoever came up with the name of Casey Affleck for the role of Jim would not have had any other option because if you can think of physically draining you out of impossible dragging dullness with ease, that could be him. Yet he gave unbelievable mature performances in “The Assassination of Jesse James by Coward Robert Ford” and “Gone Baby Gone”. A film which is depressing and disgustingly lazy makes loathe this bum who has given up on life with out even moving a muscle to flinch. Actor Steve Buscemi’s directorial venture meditates the ambience of disappointment and despair that there are multiple instances wherein we are on the verge of giving up on the film.

Jim is back to hometown to stay with his old parents Don (Seymour Cassel) and Sally (Mary Kay Place) not of choice. He is broke. We are befuddled by the intensity of numbness Jim emanates towards his parents and his divorced brother Tim (Kevin Corrigan). These are the people caught up in the scale they have set phenomenally low and just seeing it makes them give up. Jim is no accident from a town like this. Tim has two girls and coaches a basket ball team which is yet to make a basket in the whole season. Sally is the cheery bubbly mother who cannot let her boys grow up. She gets new towels for her filthy son, keeps an empty plate in the table when one is in the hospital and most of all covers her eyes and eats candy amongst the ditches of boredom.

The film begins in a drenched and dull day. When Jim gets out of the home to go for a drink, we see this town. The place is a cross section of mid big town where hopping pubs are all run by owners related to each other or used to work together to became business rivals. If the bar “Riki’s” has people you do not want to face, you have “Riki’s II” and if that is too dead for you, then you can always vouch on “Riki’s III” for some action. Jim finds that in a single mom nurse Anika (Liv Tyler), too beautiful and too mature for the bar, for him and for the town itself. We are surprised by her approach towards this hopeless suicidal person. His energy for hopelessness runs so much that he manages to make his brother attempt to kill himself but of course Tim has had similar “accidents” before says his dad.

A dark and staunched film of a low attitude beyond imagination, “Lonesome Jim” gets us in a level we are not able to confront. Here is a person not shy of shamelessly sitting on a couch to deny answering a phone call all day and bold to say no to work when his family is in shambles and exercises mind yoga of nothingness. It became incredibly uncomfortable watching the film after a while. We get angry at this loser. We want to shook his body off and talk some sense. Do these people exist in this axis of earth? Yes but the real shocker is that whether there is a chance of an Anika in a town like that who falls for this downer? Initially I thought it was impossible and in fact stood out as the only unreal character in the film. Later we evaluate her based on the town. Every time I doubted the possibility of her actions, a spare thought laminated the plausibility.

Anika while initially acquaint Jim because he is beyond hope and mainly she can have the control. His lethargic attitude appeals as a laid back which she very much needs in a hard working labour of being a single mom. Slowly she gets hooked onto this person who is very much aware of the goodness in other people but sits tight and wants to embrace the disappointment life eventually has to give. Questioning this relationship is a male mentality. We (or to be precise I) cannot tolerate that a jerk like Jim does not deserve a beautiful thoughtful girl like Anika. But I guess one can never infer a female’s mind on what they want or what they appreciate. I made myself to think such to realize that Jim offers her the much needed compliment in an honest way unaware of himself. He at one point even asks her that she deserves better and that scene is a slit through a window for a lonely and desperate single mom in a desolated town.

Jim is the condensed exemplified person of every one’s cowardice and pessimism. He wants to be a writer and the only close thing he could come up being that is practice the art of misery as his idols were all. Seeing Jim, I was reminded of the film “Naked” where the protagonist hates the world and accepts that to survive in anyways possible. He hurts people and wanders through the dirt of street. People knowing him still cannot help a magnetic attachment of a vacuum he creates to provide a vacation from their sadness. Jim is a magnified version but not eloquent or stunning as him rather he is too lazy to move, act, cry, emote, stand up, walk, eat and live.