God Bless America

This is a black comedy. Black, as in gravity is so intense that light can not escape. In the first few moments of the film, our hero fantasizes about shooting a baby as if it were a clay pigeon. Black as night.

Bobcat Goldthwait is becoming somewhat of a specialist in black comedies, following World's Greatest Dad. As with that film, God Bless America points out the inanities of American culture, but this film even goes further.

Joel Murray stars as a guy having a very bad day. He loses his job because he sent flowers to the receptionist, his daughter doesn't want to see him unless he brings a gift, and his doctor says he has an inoperable brain tumor. He's ready to blow his brains out, but while channel-surfing he alights on a particularly repellent reality show about a spoiled teen. He decides he's going to kill her.

While committing that murder, he runs into a outcast teen, played by Tara Lynne Barr. They decide to go on a killing spree, shooting people that deserve it. Here Goldthwait goes after some low-hanging fruit, as the victims include a frothing-at-the mouth right-wing pundit, kids who talk at the movies, and the lowest fruit of all, the Westboro Baptist picketers. If that all isn't obvious enough, the climax occurs at an American Idol-style talent show.

Goldthwait, in the supplemental materials, says he was inspired by Network and Badlands, and that is dead-on (Falling Down, another film it could be compared to, is more about white rage). "Liberals with guns," is also what he calls it, and there is the problem with the film. Liberals, as a rule, don't go on shooting sprees, they just fantasize about it.

The film was released in 2011, before some incidents that make this film less funny. The shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, as well as the shooting involving a patron who would not turn off his cell phone, hone a little too close to the bone. But I have deeper issues with this film. Basically, it is Goldthwait vicariously living out his fantasies via his characters. Murray can't stand the incivility that has taken hold of the country, with people being mean to each other. He has several monologues about the breakdown of American civilization. But is this really new? It reminds me of Plato's complaints about the youth of today, or the song "Kids Today," from Bye Bye Birdie. Societies always have exploited the weak. Goldthwaite compares the era or reality TV to the games at the Colosseum in Rome, and says that this always signals the toppling of an empire. Maybe, but gladiators were performing in Rome at its heights, for hundreds of years.

But here's the test that I think the movie fails: imagine a couple of killers going on a spree shooting liberals, like the Tea Party gone wild. Would it be considered funny to Goldthwait if someone went after a former stand-up comic turned director? What God Bless America boils down to is smug liberals, secure in their superiority to the masses, having a laugh while watching stand-ins for people they hate, like Sean Hannity or Simon Cowell, get riddled with bullets.

The cast is good, but I couldn't get behind the film, as there's just no way to make people go on a killing spree funny, not in this time and place.