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God Bless America: Be Nice… Or Die!

By Ryan Mason · May 13, 2012

Bleak, depressing and sometimes funny, God Bless America is less a critique on American culture and more a cynical yet straightforward morality tale. Unless comedic criticism simply entails the main character killing all the low-hanging fruit in our cornucopia of celebrity-saturated mass media that passes for news and entertainment these days.

Joel Murray is excellent as Frank Murdoch is a middle-aged, divorced paper-pusher who gets fired for sending flowers to a co-worker and then finds out that his migraine headaches are caused by a brain tumor that leaves him terminally ill. Meanwhile his own daughter would rather play on her iPhone than ever come visit him. All in all, not a great time in Frank’s life, with not much positive looming on the horizon. After an episode of My Happy Birthday Sweet 16 pushes him over the edge, Frank kills the spoiled brat on the show in broad daylight, drawing the attention of rebellious teen Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr, who is absolutely fantastic and bears a striking resemblance to a young Reese Witherspoon).

Together they’re an irregular Bonnie and Clyde, cruising the country in a stolen, brand new, yellow Chevy Camero (with plenty of ironic glamour shots as they pass by scenic lakes during magic hour) shooting up anyone who just acts like an asshole – from a guy who parks his BMW taking up two spots to a bunch of kids talking on their cell phones during a movie. None of these people are real human beings, though, since they’re all just non-dimensional stereotypes or thinly veiled spoofs. They don’t elicit any sympathy or surprise or much of anything at all aside from the occasional chuckle, which includes both Frank and Roxy despite having the most backstory and development of all the characters in the film.

But that’s essentially what you pay for when it comes to dark comedies. It’s not about the actual characters so much as what – or who – the filmmaker makes them represent. In this case, Frank speaks for writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait’s disdain for nearly every current ill in our society and inability to see any of the good, while Roxy embodies the younger generation’s overly self-awareness (and self-important) for its complicity in all those same cultural maladies. All this creates a level of distance between the film and the viewer. We know this is all just a twisted fantasy of someone angry at all the negativity in the world. We want to know just how far it will go and hopefully laugh at the absurdity of it. But, and perhaps this is part of its commentary, nothing in God Bless America seems all that shocking.

While the film is clearly politically minded, with most of the ire aimed at conservative targets like talk radio, TV news commentators, and Westboro Church-style anti-homosexual protestors, Goldthwait goes out of his way to make sure that Frank isn’t motivated to violence purely out of some political agenda. He is simply tired of everyone being so mean to everyone else. Just before shooting political pundit Michael Dunne (Regan Burns), Frank says that he actually agrees with some of his stances, much to the dismay of Roxy. After they dispatch of the TV host, Roxy asks which beliefs he agrees with, to which Frank dryly replies: “Less gun control, of course.” You see, Frank might be a remorseless killer, but he’s not without his own code of ethics.

God Bless America pulls no punches in exacting cinematic vigilante justice against all of those that his alter ego believes deserve it. Whether that’s the Bill O’Reilly-esque Dunne or the Harvey Levin-inspired TV personality or the hosts of the American Idol-style TV show American Superstarz, Frank has no problem killing men, women, or children so long as they deserve to die – which of course, is left for him to decide. But, aside from the promising opening scene in which Frank dreams of blowing away the neighbor’s incessantly crying baby with a shotgun, God Bless America never truly lets itself go fully into its own premise, with even the most shocking scene neutered by being only a fantasy sequence itself. Not that he needed to kill more babies, necessarily, but perhaps having Frank and Roxy do more things that elicited the “No way they just did that” could’ve elevated this from being a couple steps above a spoof of Falling Down to being the scathingly dark comedy it wants to be.