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For a film that bills itself alternately as a tense thriller and a dark comedy, Martin Donovan’s directorial debut, Collaborator is woefully short on tension, thrills, and laughs. A small, intimate piece that would be much better suited for the stage than the screen, it’s not truly a bad film so much as one that never quite manages to cohere into something that you’ll remember five minutes after the credits roll.
Donovan plays Robert Longfellow, a playwright whose latest production has landed with a thud and whose personal life isn’t in much better shape. Going back to his mother’s home in the San Fernando Valley, he runs into his old neighbor, Gus (David Morse), a gruff ex-con facing his own crisis. The unexpected reunion takes a darker turn when the cops show up and Gus takes Robert hostage. During the standoff, tensions between the right-wing, blue-collar Gus and left-wing, professional Robert begin to emerge, leading to, well, talking—lots and lots of talking.
That’s not my problem with the film, however. Both Donovan and Morse are fine actors, and each brings nuance and subtlety to well-crafted discussions on politics, art, and the characters’ expectations of the world. Olivia Williams also gets a substantial part as a noted actress ex-girlfriend of Robert’s, whom Gus is giddy to get a chance to talk to on the phone. When these three are interacting, there’s clearly life in the script. It’s a shame that so little of it seems to wind up on the screen.
I have to think that watching Robert and Gus butt heads in person on a stage would lend the project a vitality that isn’t present in the film itself. The stage and screen just don’t function the same way, and the minimalist approach that Donovan employs as a director hobbles the film from the beginning. The first 20 minutes follow Robert through his pathetic current circumstances—an understandable choice, given that the audience is going to spend the next hour in a living room with just two guys and a telephone, but none of the details have much weight to them. Donovan achieves nearly the same effect simply through the hang-dog expression that he wears through most of the film.
Even when the film focuses on the hostage stand-off, it comes off as relatively bloodless, both physically and metaphorically. From time to time, it’s easy to forget that Gus has a gun and there’s an unusually patient SWAT team waiting for him outside. It’s kind of a running joke that these guys are just hanging out and shooting the breeze over some beers—except, for that joke to land, we’d have to believe that they actually are in a situation where someone is likely going to die.
I can imagine a version of Collaborator performed on stage in a small theater that could be absolutely riveting. The material is in there, briefly surfacing in a turn of phrase or some back-and-forth banter. But, as it stands, the audience reaction to this film is most likely going to mirror the one that Robert’s play gets at the beginning: polite but listless silence, ending in perfunctory applause.
