Gabriel
Written and directed by Lou Howe
USA, 2014
The stereotype of mental illness on film is not too dissimilar from the stereotype of mental retardation put forward by the film Tropic Thunder: Successful characters have to be “disturbed,” but they can’t be completely out of control, or else audiences won’t relate to them. Thus, Lou Howe’s debut feature Gabriel, opening this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, draws notice simply because it challenges the rule. The titular character is ill to a degree that the audience cannot completely understand, and he gives an otherwise standard film the depth and edge that it needs.
This will not be clear at the start of the picture. We first meet Gabriel (Rory Culkin) on a lonely search for his long-lost girlfriend, wherein he inadvertently teaches a small child to smoke cigarettes and steals a pair of the girlfriend’s panties for the purpose of smelling them. He may be weird, or creepy, but by the standards of the modern mainstream romantic comedy — epitomized by the famous Onion article, “Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested” — he’s not at all unusual. Gabriel is presented as one of those relatively harmless asylum patients from a Hollywood movie, more of a bumbler than someone to fear. It’s only when he begins to interact with his family that it becomes clear: this is not a romantic comedy, and Gabriel is no mere bumbler.
Culkin’s performance is impressive. There are some aspects that we’ve all seen before in films with mentally ill characters, such as a twitchy face or excessive talking to himself for no reason. However, the best aspects of his work are reflected in how unpredictable Gabriel is. When he tells his mother (a superb Deirdre O’Connell) that he loves her or hates her, he’s not lying; there is no dishonesty in Culkin’s acting. He’s simply sick, lost in the grip of mood swings that he can’t control and that Culkin is willing to fully commit to.
The unpredictability goes a long way towards making the film tense. One never watches Rain Man thinking that Dustin Hoffman will cheat Tom Cruise, nor watches A Beautiful Mind thinking that Russell Crowe will murder Jennifer Connelly (despite the scene where he knocks Connelly down). The events of Gabriel, however, are relatively difficult to predict. Gabriel is a danger to himself and others; the only question is how big that danger is, and Howe rightly plays coy with that knowledge. Likewise, Culkin’s best touches as a actor are those where he subtly increases the amount of danger the audience can expect without signaling too strongly where the film will end.
Gabriel’s obsession with the leaves on a tree or the whirring of a ceiling fan are presented as though Howe has conceived some novel presentation of his uniquely warped perceptions, though nothing could be further from the truth (last year’s Tribeca hit, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is just one example of a film which did the same thing). But what is new is that way that Gabriel, in the midst of his lowest despair, screams the worst possible insults at his mother and brother and they refuse to be drawn in. Gabriel’s rages are received with nothing but a soothing voice and a comforting presence, instead of the sort of screaming fights that have been a dramatic staple of mental illness ever since Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence. It goes a long way towards creating the chemistry of an actual family, of saying, “We’ve seen this all before” without requiring too much exposition.
After all of this character-building, it might be reasonably said that Gabriel peters out in the end. The film builds gradually, adding layer upon layer of Gabriel’s psychosis to such a degree that the film’s resolution might inspire puzzled patrons to ask, “That’s it?” But it’s a testament to the various performances in the film that during its running time, Gabriel’s actions are literally impossible to predict, neither by the audience nor by the characters who know him best. Whatever this film’s shortcomings, that is a feat of storytelling which marks Howe as one to watch.
— Mark Young