Oldboy

I'm going to start writing about the films I see again.  Starting with this one.

Movie Review: Oldboy

Reason for Watching: Ever late to the party, I heard many good things about Oldboy from a variety of sources with increasing frequency over the past month.  Curiosity.

Capsule Reaction: Super-good genre piece with all the inherent joys and limitations the phrase "genre piece" entails.

White elephant in the room time.  When I saw the main character of Oldboy bite into a live octopus with gusto, I couldn't help but notice how little empathy I had for the creature.  Even when its tentacles curled up and grasped the man's nose, the act seemed to be more reflexive than desperate.  To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what I was supposed to feel during this scene.  I suppose it exists to demonstrate to the viewer Dae-su Oh's commitment, his fortitude, or even his impatience to strike out at the world.  And, true, it nicely echoes a pledge he's previously made in the film to devour every part of a torturer's body.  Nevertheless, it's a literal show-stopping moment that takes one out of the picture and inspires no thought but the obvious: what the hell does that taste like?

Onward.  Oldboy is a fantastic film stymied by an overstuffed and absurd storyline.  The premise is delicious and simple: a drunken lout, Dae-su Oh, is abducted and held captive for fifteen years with no explanation.  When he emerges, he's understandably devoted to discovering why this ordeal has befallen him and who he can hold responsible for the fifteen years of life he has lost.  It is a mystery and a quite complex yet simple affair as it turns out.  There's nothing so unbelievable as to break all strands of credulity in Oldboy, but it flies pretty close at times (A late-movie revelation about the hypnosis of two key characters comes to mind.)  Worse, information is sometimes doled out in a dialogue-heavy manner with acting, subject matter, and dialogue not unlike that of an unconvincing video game cutscene you wish you could skip.  

In fact, very often the movie feels much like a more-mature-than-usual video game with its ruminations on the futility of revenge, its casual use of violence as the sole method of communicating differing levels of anger, despair, grief, and shame.  These attributes are tolerable at best in the burgeoning world of video games.  Here, in movie-land, when these same things raise their heads, their adolescent natures grate.

That said, these are the kind of gripes you have for a movie that's so close to greatness, you want to shake the fun out of it.  "Stop fucking around with these well-made fight scenes, the leering sadism, and the villain's impossibly fiendish plot," I wanted to say to Oldboy, like a parent trying to get a bright high school kid to stop hanging out with the bad crowd.  The movie is wonderfully made.  It's shot in an elegant, emotionally affecting way, the kind of cinematography that, using color and framing, subtly guides your own emotions to the ones the movie's interested in exploring without being heavy-handed.  Additionally, the movie's adolescent tendencies serve it well when it's digging into the characters' pain, whether it is physical or emotional.  It renders emotional torture as effectively as the tooth-pulling physical kind and reveals the inner lives of its characters with cinematic clarity, insight, and invention.

Best of all, Min-sik Choi is brilliant as Dae-su Oh.  He finds more reasons to express joy and happiness in the familiar revenge-bound antihero than any other in memory and when called upon to deliver moments of intense regret, fear, or despair, he delivers with such skilled passion that, to my foreign eyes and ears, he needs absolutely no translation.  It is his work that nearly elevates this film above a well-executed genre film and into greatness.