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The Observer
November 22, 1998
Arts: Suicide is dangerous
by Philip French
Black comedy is the favourite genre of American independent filmmakers, partly because it reflects the uneasy temper of the millennial times and partly because it provides a cloak for callowness and callousness to take the stage as worldly wisdom. Dan Rosen's feature debut, Dead Man's Curve, however, is genuinely black, extremely funny and touches on the interesting theme of how the corrupt, unscrupulous young exploit their innocent, scrupulous elders.
The plot of this fiendishly ingenious film is about some fiendishly ingenious plotters who take advantage of the generosity of the liberal community in which they are being raised. Tim (Matthew Lillard) and Chris (Michael Vartan), seniors at a small, idyllic university, discover that the college gives top grades on all final papers (ie straight As) to any student whose room-mate commits suicide. Taking advantage of a scheme that will guarantee the rich, sadistic Tim entry into Harvard Law School and the diffident, working-class Chris a place at Harvard Business School, they push their room-mate Rand (Randall Batinkoff) off a local cliff and make it look like suicide. In a cleverly written opening sequence, Chris sets the victim up as a potential suicide in the mind of the sympathetic psychiatric student counsellor (Dana Delaney). When the plan is successfully executed, she and the university's kindly, pipe-smoking chancellor react exactly as predicted. But then the dead man's girlfriend, who has discovered she's pregnant, throws herself from the same cliff, and her room-mate (who happens to be Chris's girlfriend) is thu! s guaranteed a place in Harvard Medical School. The local police take an interest in the case, and the plan doesn't so much unravel as ravel more intricately.
You could say Dead Man's Curve is Strangers on a Train played for laughs, and indeed the director knows the plot of any picture you could think of at a party, the protagonists re-enact the Russian roulette sequence from The Deer Hunter using beer cans instead of revolvers.
But under the jokey surface, the film is deadly serious. These young people are growing up in a society where the gap between the successes and the failures is growing ever wider. As an embittered university security officer with no chance of advancement says: 'It used to be enough to have a high-school diploma; then you had to have a university degree; now you've got to have been to graduate school to get anywhere.' 'It's either an MBA from Harvard or you're plopping hamburgers,' Chris says, and on the girls' bedroom wall is a poster of an athlete on his back and the slogan 'You don't win silver, you lose gold'.
These kids are ambitious, intelligent, and not so much unconstrained by their consciences as willing to set aside moral considerations; they're psychopaths by choice, creations of their culture. Dead Man's Curve is brisk, deftly handled, witty, and it plays both ends against the middle by mocking both the decent concern of the teachers and the self-pitying grief of the student body. The performances of the central characters are especially interesting, because what we're observing is people acting out roles, sometimes for each others' benefit, sometimes not.
Made last year, Dead Man's Curve has a line that has since gained an ironic topicality. Caught in flagrante by her boyfriend while fellating his room-mate, a girl explains: 'It's not as if we had sex.'
© Guardian Newspapers Limited
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