Review: Auggie Rose

Insurance salesman Jeff Goldblum is complaining about a scratch on a wine bottle to clerk Auggie Rose (Kim Coates) when an armed robber enters the picture, and kills Auggie. Shattered by the incident that he sees his petty request (Do people reject a bottle of Coke just because the label is a bit torn? Fucking take it and drink it you wanker!) as being partly responsible for the man’s death, Goldblum starts digging into the man’s life. He was a recently paroled man who had only recently gotten the job. Cop Richard T. Jones warns Goldblum not to keep sticking his nose in, but Goldblum can’t help himself, finding out where Auggie lived and visiting his apartment. He finds the letters he wrote in prison to the woman he hadn’t had a chance to even meet on the outside before his tragic death. Goldblum goes to meet the woman (Anne Heche- a bit more appealing than, well…ever, really), and when she assumes that Goldblum is Auggie, he doesn’t correct her. And so it goes. Nancy Travis plays Goldblum’s superficial and impatient girlfriend, and Timothy Olyphant plays a clearly dangerous crim looking for a likeminded person to go into a heist with him.

 

Terribly off-putting title, isn’t? The only Auggie I’ve ever heard of was that cartoon dog from Hanna-Barbera cartoons, and I couldn’t get the voices of Auggie and his equally annoying dad out of my head here. Apparently this 2001 film from director Matthew Tabak (who has only worked on TV movies since, principally as a writer) also goes by the name of “Beyond Suspicion”, but that makes it sound like a generic TV movie starring Melissa Gilbert, Tom Irwin, and Clancy Brown or something (It certainly has no bearing on the plot of the film). Scripted by the director, what it really is, is yet another example of the talented, versatile, and idiosyncratic Jeff Goldblum choosing lesser material to work with.

 

There’s nothing wrong with the premise nor Goldblum’s performance, which is as strong as ever. He’s especially good at selling his struggle to deal with the fact that a guy died essentially because of his petty complaint about a bottle of wine. It only gets more interesting when he tries to investigate this guy’s life and ends up assuming his identity (Being a boring insurance salesman, you can see why one might want to be someone else). This is a guy who was a recently paroled ex-con and recently employed store clerk, who may have actually been setting about on the straight and narrow…but no one will ever know now. He could’ve gone back to being a crim, sure, but we’ll never know. That’s incredibly sad, a life cut short before he had a chance to take advantage on his second chance in life.

 

Unfortunately, after an interesting first half, things take a nosedive in the second when Anne Heche turns up and Goldblum’s behaviour becomes much more difficult to accept. In fact, the second half would be hard to watch if it weren’t for the typically edgy and dangerous performance by Timothy Olyphant. Anne Heche is surprisingly believable as a naïve and lonely small-town girl, but like I said, once her character shows up, the wheels fall off (For one thing, it’s ridiculous that she never questions how a recently paroled ex-con got so freakin’ tanned on the inside!). I feel particularly bad for the very talented Nancy Travis, who has played the wife/girlfriend far too often over the years, and this time gets saddled with also being the heartless, non-understanding girlfriend to boot. There’s nothing anyone could do with that role, not even Cate Blanchett (No, I will not use Meryl Streep as the standard bearer, in case you were about to ask). Hell, there are similar beats to the character she played in the remake of “The Vanishing”, though much less fleshed out here.

 

There’s a lot to appreciate in this film, including following its unpredictable trajectory. However, I hate it when characters situations could so easily be remedied if they’d simply tell the truth from the outset. After a while, I just stopped believing in it, being pulled away from it. Damn, that first half hour in particular was terrific and quite sad, but this ends up being an interesting failure overall, despite good work by Goldblum and Timothy Olyphant.

 

Rating: C+