To what extent does talent, even genius, license bad behavior in an artist? This is the subject of the Australian director, Thomas M. Wright's 2018 Acute Misfortune. Based on true events, the film requires some knowledge, I think, of Australian media and the arts Down Under. I found Acute Misfortune stylish, skillfully acted, and quite frightening -- the picture involves a sacre monstre, a skin-head painter who terrorizes everyone around him. But I had to admit that I didn't exactly grasp what was happening during some of the picture and the director's extremely oblique and reticent style adds to the confusion. As an example, the film's young protagonist, Erik, goes for a ride on the villainous artist's motorcycle. As he accelerates, the artist, a painter named Adam Cullen, shrugs his shoulders and Erik drops off onto the road where he is scraped up and suffers a bad case of road-rash. The movie is made with no budget to speak of and so the director probably didn't have the resources to stage the accident. We don't understand exactly what has happened until a later shot, perhaps, half a minute after the almost-lethal shoulder-shrug, shows us Erik injured and sitting on the asphalt. We grasp that Cullen has intentionally dropped his protege, and supposed biographer, on the highway. But we don't exactly see the act and the obscurity as to to the physical dimensions of this incident is mirrored by the film's central enigma -- what exactly is Cullen's motive? Why did he intentionally harm a man that he has, as it were, purchased to be his sole friend? The enigmatic manner in which the film presents key events reflects the fact that Cullen poses a mystery that no one can quite solve.
Erik Jensen (Toby Wallace) is a 19-year old whiz kid, a precocious sort of Citizen Kane of Australian journalism. He writes for a life-style magazine and lives in the suburbs near an Australian city, unidentified but probably Brisbane. After covering a shooting, possibly a suicide, the kid is assigned to cover a retrospective of the paintings of Adam Cullen (Daniel Henshell) who is, then, 42 years old. Cullen turns out to be a vicious person -- he's got swastikas on the ceilings of his studio and brags about beating up women. He bullies everyone around him relentlessly -- for instance, when his aging father comes to look at some of his paintings (the old man is playwright), Cullen leaves him waiting for several hours and, then, mercilessly denounces him as "a fucking idiot". Cullen seems to have some kind of pathological connection to his mother and, late in the film, an appointment calendar is given to Erik that is empty except for entries relating to visits to Cullen's mom (who is dying of leukemia during the period that the film shows). Erik's initial article about Cullen is successful and the artist proclaims that the young man understands ("gets") him unlike more conventional critics and, of course, the women in his life. Cullen announces that he is appointing the young man as his official biographer and says that a book about his life and work has been commissioned by Thames and Hudson -- the kid is supposed to write the book. (This turns out to be a difficult assignment because Cullen threatens Erik when he gets too close to the truth and intentionally obstructs his work.) The financial aspects about this transaction are left unclear -- I'm not sure whether Cullen is paying Erik for his work. The relationship gets off to a rocky start when Cullen points a shotgun at Erik and intentionally shoots him in the leg. It's at this point that you root for Erik abandoning the project and getting clear of the Svengali-like influence of the artist. But Erik, who is homosexual, is intrigued by Cullen and continues to interact with him, more or less, as a paid friend. (Needless to say no one else wants much to do with the "bad boy" artist.) Cullen is revealed to be not only a loathsome bully but also a heroin addict, although he denies that he is a junkie. (Do I look like an addict? Do I talk like one? Cullen asks. The obvious answer, of course, is "yes".) Cullen seems to be an artist whose work is sensationalist -- he has painted one big canvas on which there is simply scribbled "My Dad had sex with Mom," a childish scrawl that, apparently, gullible art collectors are willing to purchase for big bucks -- much to the derision and amusement of Cullen's dad who thinks his son is a fraud. In fact, Cullen is talented and was a gifted draftsman when he was a child -- he paints a portrait of Erik that is featured in the film's final shot. (Cullen was a real artist and the movie tracks a book about the artist written by the real life Erik Jensen, Acute Misfortune -- a closing title tells us that the paintings in the movie are real canvases, here authorized for use in the film by "The Estate of Adam Cullen.") Cullen seems to fear that he is losing his powers and becomes, if anything, more aggressive and nasty -- for instance, he elbows poor Erik off his motorcycle. The beatings and electrocutions that he visits upon the hapless women in his life (never shown thankfully in this very tactful film) catch up with him as legal consequences. Several times he passes out due to drug overdoses it seems, including at Erik's birthday party with his own loving family. Cullen takes Erik out into the Blue Mountain wilderness where they shoot off guns and camp, sleeping under the open sky -- again, Cullen overdoses and almost dies. Later, he's arrested and has many, many unregistered guns in his possession, apparently, a serious offense in Australia. He's convicted but let off with a suspended sentence. By this time, Cullen has been claiming to everyone that he's dying of pancreatic cancer -- in fact, he's on the skids due to his heroin use. After several years, the rather gullible Erik discovers that there is no book contract with Thames and Hudson -- "it doesn't work that way," a bemused editor tells him. Of course, the artist was a pathological liar. Cullen maybe loves Erik and probably recognizes that he's queer. But he's too macho to declare his love and, finally, says that "women are too weak" for him. A closing title tells us that Andrew Cullen died at age 47, providing us with the date of his passing.
Cullen seems to be a figure a bit like Damien Hirst or, possibly, Francis Bacon mashed-up with Jean-Michel Basquiat. He's a provocateur who has lost his way. At the end of his life, he's blasting away at cans of spray paint set next to canvases with his illegal guns. During his prime, Cullen was the favorite of all the taxi drivers in the "north suburbs" (he likes that area because the people are all White) due to his $300 tips. Often, he would hire a cab to go to a local McDonald's to order "a white coffee with three sugars." Near the end of the movie, we see a lonely looking hamburger with a cup of coffee sitting on the street unattended. The film is shot in old Academy ratio, pillar-boxed and the texture of the movie is grainy, slightly out-of-focus, with very muted colors -- I think the movie may be shot on super-8 or, perhaps, 16 mm and, then, blown up to 35 millimeter format. The picture is very sophisticated, oblique, and understated -- in fact, it's so understated that I couldn't figure out what was going on in many scenes. As with Wright's second film, The Stranger, the movie divides its time between featureless Australian suburbs and the outback. Cullen claimed that one of the primary inspirations for his morbid and funereal art is Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children and we see the horrific image at various times in the picture. The movie takes place, apparently, over five years, although the passage of time is never clearly defined. I'm impressed by Wright's integrity and his refusal to dramatize things, but the picture is made in a style that is a mere whisper -- half the time, I couldn't tell what I was supposed to think about the proceedings; I couldn't exactly hear what I was supposed to hear, figuratively and literally. For instance, the revelation that Cullen's appointment calendar mostly consists of notations of encounters with his mother is presented as something grave, significant, even, portentous -- but I couldn't tell what this was supposed to mean. There is a mostly unknown American film with a similar subject -- this is Ron Shelton's 1994 Cobb (with Tommy Lee Jones); in that picture, a journalist is hired to ghost-write the autobiography of Ty Cobb, who turns out to have been a vicious racist, misanthrope and thug. Acute Misfortune would make an interesting double-feature with the equally dour and problematic Cobb.
(Wikipedia informs me that Adam Cullen died in 2012 after a "long illness". In the film, Henshell, who plays the actor, changes his appearance radically to show the decline in Cullen's health -- Henshell lost forty pounds and, by the end of the film, the formerly physically imposing Cullen is just a ghost of himself. Cullen lived in Wentworth Falls, about 100 miles west of Sydney in New South Wales and the train rides prominently featured in the film show Erik Jensen traveling to and from Cullen's studio. Cullen was born in 1965; he was convicted of gun and drunk driving offenses in the year or so before his death. He is known as a punk-rock-influenced "grunge" artist -- some of his paintings are very impressive. Jensen, born in 1988, continues to be an important figure in Australian journalism. In the penultimate chapter of his book, Jensen reveals that before he died Cullen admitted he was bisexual and in love with the young journalist.)
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