To Dust

If you like buddy comedies that are extremely dark, you may imagine To Dust, which also has one of the more unlikely pairings in any film I've seen--a Hasidic Jew and a college biology professor. The subject matter is the decomposition of corpses. That's not a typo.

Geza Rohig plays a Hasidim who has just lost his wife to cancer. He grieves more than most, and is urged to get on with his life. But he has nightmares about her decomposing body. He is compelled to find out just what has happened to her after she was buried. After a trip to a funeral parlor proves fruitless, he seeks the knowledge of a community college biology professor, Matthew Broderick.

At first Broderick is of no help, but eventually takes pity on him and shows him a book about taphonomy, which is the study of organic decomposition. The book uses an example of a pig, and Rohrig takes this as giving him the go ahead to bury a pig and sees what happens to it. Broderick is horrified, but can't help but continuing to encourage him, telling him he needs a freshly killed pig. So Rohrig shows up at Broderick's apartment with a live pig which he has stolen.

Eventually the two make a road trip to a place in Knoxville, Tennesee (this is a real place) that leaves bodies out in the open to study how they decompose, mostly for forensic purposes. At this point you will either be with the film or not. While I found some of it morbidly funny, I didn't believe a bit of it.

First of all, Rohrig's motives are unclear. At one point Broderick asks him why he is doing it. "I don't know!' roars Rohrig. If he doesn't know, how can we know? With Broderick, who plays a standard version of his hapless characters (at one point he is relaxing at home in a woman's bathrobe) we have to wonder why he continues to aid this man in a very strange quest. At most points in the film, which was written and directed by Shawn Snyder and co-written by Snyder and Jason Begue, characters seem to be doing only what the script demands of them, not what they really would be doing. I mean, really, how many of us would go out in the woods with a Hasidic Jew to dig up a pig to see how much it had decomposed?

The film also gets a little offensive in the treatment of the Jews here. Rohrig's sons think he is being possessed by a dybbuk, and jokes about his Jewishness are peppered throughout. At one point Broderick says to him, totally without irony, "Who doesn't love bacon?" while another woman tells Rohrig "Jesus loves you." I'm not sure this is an accurate representation of Orthodox Jews.

But it has a few laughs and will appeal to the macabre nature of our souls. And maybe all of us have a a secret interest in just what happens to dead bodies after they are buried.