Slim Jim

Lonesome Jim is the slight, muted, quirkier younger sibling of Garden State. An aimless, affectless slacker with artistic pretensions heads home from the big city, meets a lively, offbeat young woman, and takes a small step toward a life of positive action rather than empty do-nothing cynicism. Along the way, he meets a cast of small town eccentrics and weirdos, confronts the past he left behind, and wrestles with his relationship with his father. It was pretty good the first time when Zach Braff wrote, directed and starred, and it’s pretty good this time under the crafty guidance of director Steve Buscemi.

Buscemi’s Beckettian aesthetic and dry, subtly cruel sense of humor are just as much on display here as in his classic Sopranos episode, “Pine Barrens.” That episode found Paulie and Christopher lost in a snow-covered forest, trudging around in search of a Russian thug who may or may not be dead. Bickering and caviling through the endless white hills, their desolate toiling was a blackly comic delight, all hopeless, desperate posturing and casual suffering. It was Endgame by way of Goodfellas, and the uniquely bleak episode has remained one of the show’s highlights. Jim works on much the same level, casting life as a series of insults, disappointments and ignominious ends--life as smirking existential parody.

Darker, drabber, and wryer than Garden State, Jim shares with that film a love of curious characters. Liv Tyler gives her most watchable performance yet at the naïve-but-not-stupid single mom love interest, and Mark Boone Junior, so good as the sleazy cop in Batman Begins, turns in a show-stealing performance as the scooter-riding dimwit drug dealer “Evil.” Unfortunately, like Garden State, the film’s titular protagonist is lifeless. Casey Affleck is suitably grungy and deprettified, but he’s simply a feeble, selfish twit. It’s not even so much that he’s unlikable—although he is—it’s that he’s empty. It’s one thing to center a film on someone who’s less than pleasant, but he shouldn’t be bland as well.

Shot on digital video, the film boasts a flat, grey picture that’s as wintry and dull as its protagonist, only to much better effect. Behind the camera, Buscemi displays a directorial knack for underplaying scenes with dryly comic precision. And if he never figures out what to do with his too-hollow main character, it’s a fault that can mostly be forgiven—after all, one has to expect a certain amount of dreariness and disconnection from a movie called Lonesome Jim.