Kevin Smith’s horror comedy has a premise most directors would not touch, a performance from Michael Parks that justifies it, and a second half it hands to Johnny Depp in a false nose. Most critics shrugged. We think the nerve is the point.
Kevin Smith’s Tusk began as a joke on Smith’s own podcast, about a classified advert offering free lodging to anyone prepared to live as a walrus, and the film never quite stops being that joke. Smith writes it, directs it and cuts it himself. The question he has set is whether an idea that lasts a minute in conversation can last 102 on screen, and the answer, just, is yes, because of Michael Parks.
Parks plays Howard Howe, the old man who put the notice up, and he does not play him as a monster. He plays him as a host. He pours tea, he tells long stories about his life, and he does it in a soft, pleased voice that never once asks to be believed. The speeches are long and Parks makes every one of them seem shorter than it is.
James Laxton shoots the house in lamplight, all amber and brown, and keeps the camera low, so that Wallace, upright and chattering, is always looking down at a man he has already underestimated. John D. Kretschmer dresses the place like a museum nobody visits. When Wallace wakes the next morning and Howe, in the same pleasant voice, explains what happened to him in the night, we went cold on the sofa. It is the one stretch where the comedy and the horror are the same thing, and Parks is doing all of it with his face.
Justin Long plays Wallace Bryton as a man we are meant to dislike, a podcaster who makes his living laughing at other people, and Long commits to the moustache and the smirk. It is a brave choice and a costly one. When the plot turns on whether anyone will come for Wallace, the film has spent half an hour making sure we would not. Haley Joel Osment and Genesis Rodriguez, as the partner and the girlfriend who set out to find him, are given scenes of worry that run long and tell us little, and Smith the editor lets them run.
Then Johnny Depp arrives. He plays Guy Lapointe, a former detective from Quebec who has been chasing Howe for years, with a false nose, a beret and an accent that lands somewhere between Clouseau and a man doing Clouseau at a party. His first scene, in a diner, lasts the better part of ten minutes and consists of him telling a story about the time he nearly caught his man. We laughed, twice. Then we became aware that the film had stopped, that Howard Howe was out of sight, and that nobody behind the camera seemed to mind. That scene is where the audience splits, and it is a fault, though not a fatal one, because the film goes back to the house.
Christopher Drake’s score does the serious work, low strings and a slow pulse under Howe’s monologues, and in the second half it is better than the scenes it is under. Smith plays Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” over the climax, and it is the one piece of cheek in the film that is well judged. The make-up, when the title’s promise is finally kept, is wet, grey and far more upsetting than funny, which is to its credit; we will not describe it beyond that.
Smith’s best films, Clerks (1994) above all, are men talking in rooms, and the first half of Tusk is exactly that, except that one of the men is holding a bone saw. Red State (2011) showed he could keep dread going when he wanted to. Here he keeps it going for forty minutes, drops it in a diner, and picks it up again for the end. Most critics marked the film down for the diner and forgot the house. A film that sends half its audience out furious and the other half delighted has not lost its nerve; that is what nerve looks like.
It carries a 15 and runs 102 minutes, and a living room, where you can get up and put the kettle on during the diner scene, is the right-sized place for it.
