God Bless America | Review

Bobcat Goldthwait’s pop culture manifesto fires at easy targets

Writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait’s cartoonishly violent screed against cultural debasement comes from the right place but heads into hypocrisy. Goldthwait’s surrogate in ‘God Bless America’ is Frank, a mild-mannered Everyman driven to homicidal fury by civilization’s lack of civility. With nothing to lose thanks to an inoperable brain tumor, he locks, loads, and hits the highway in search of America’s worst offenders, from reality TV opportunists all the way to parking-space hogs. His righteous—and often infectious—anger at the mindlessness of American culture is ultimately undermined by the movie’s lazy reliance on formulaic moralizing. Goldthwait, from his ensconced perch in the entertainment industry, uses thinly drawn “ordinary” Americans as mouthpieces for his own privileged grievances and presumptions of intellectual superiority. He’s so busy railing against the superficiality around him, he no more than scratches his own story’s surface.

The movie’s first act is trenchant and moving. Joel Murray brings gravity and nuance to the role of Frank, a mid-level insurance company worker who is separated from his ex-wife and monstrous uber-consumer daughter. In Frank’s workplace scenes, Goldthwait pointedly captures how the banal complacencies of the group-thinking hive can swell into a suffocating, almost totalitarian oppression. Frank’s frustration is keenly felt when, after he gives an impassioned, articulate critique of a moronic TV show, a co-worker smugly dismisses him with, “32 million people disagree with you.” In a later scene of great power, a despairing Frank turns on the TV at night to seek the commiseration, insight, and solace that culture, pop or otherwise, is meant to provide, no matter the medium. Instead, he is repelled by unrelenting ugliness and idiocy.

Once the genre gears kick in, however, God Bless America turns into a series of cynical and implausible cheap shots. After Frank blows away a snotty reality-show teen queen, he is joined on his road-trip rampage by 16-year-old Roxy, a precocious misanthrope with an even longer list of potential victims. Roxy is the least convincing character, not aided by the off-pitch performance of Tara Lynne Barr, who comes across as a much-older actress trying to emotionally shrink back into adolescence. Goldthwait’s idea for Roxy might have been to create a concept more than a character, a demon version of a hyper Disney teen show character, but either way Barr fails to tap into a genuine pathology.

Goldthwait seems to know an awful lot about the world of pop culture he claims to find intolerable. The reference-heavy verbal volleys between Roxy and Frank — erratically covering everything from Alice Cooper to Diablo Cody — feel misplaced in the mouths and minds of two middle-class denizens of Anywhere, USA. Instead, their banter seems cribbed from Hollywood happy hours.

An incongruous ‘Taxi Driver’ homage (Frank surveys a sleazy gun dealer’s wares) not only falsely presumes a kinship between the two protagonists, but resorts to the same ‘American Idol’-esque tactics that the movie elsewhere vociferously mocks: Regurgitating someone else’s work without the obligation to meet the original’s level of accomplishment, and expecting credit and praise for doing so.