Careless
You can’t make a movie about an aimless post-college man finding a severed body part without invoking Blue Velvet. But where Blue Velvet turns on the slow uncovering of the seedy underbelly of conventional and perfect suburban life, Careless meanders along more slowly, with its character already wallowing with his chain-smoking father in a dead-end job and a shitty apartment. Plus, it’s a comedy.
Some thoughts:
- The Netflix description of the movie highlights the fact that our protagonist, Wiley Roth, works at a mystery book store and reads mysteries. This seems like it might make for interesting fodder. Alas, he doesn’t like mysteries and the fact that it’s a mystery book store never really becomes an issue. Sure, he tries to figure out where the finger came from, but wouldn’t you?
- A nice surprise was Fran Cranz, the computer uber-nerd from the now-canceled Dollhouse, as the wiseacre best friend, Mitch. Then there’s Tony Shalhoub as the slovenly chain-smoking father who hates Mitch. Comedy gold. I particularly enjoyed his command to the corn-dog stand man: “Dog me!”
- In some ways, the movie feels a bit like a comedy version of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, with a reluctant detective investigating a case that may or may not be a mystery, finding little, and obsessing about it anyhow. Wiley obsesses about the finger, in part, because he has nothing else to do. Unlike Dan Quinn, however, he hasn’t got the tragedy of a dead wife to weigh him down.
- I also reflected that Wiley seems like a Kevin Smith protagonist, with less clever dialog (and far less swearing). He mopes around with a scraggly beard, obsesses about and messes up his relationship, hates his job but stays in it anyway, and doesn’t know what to do with himself most of the time. Essentially, Dante from Clerks.
- Minor spoiler: The end of the movie tries to make you happy with some of the unanswered questions by implying that Wiley has settled to be happy with these questions unanswered, but I don’t buy it. There are too many Macguffins scattered through the story–throwaway bits of dialog and detail as well as more significant elements. In that regard, the story is somewhat unsatisfying.
All this makes it sound as if I didn’t enjoy the movie. It wasn’t bad, but it tried to be cool without quite getting there.

















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