Bucking Fastard review: Kate and Rooney Mara play freaky twins in a creepy, self-indulgent mess
Running time: 109 minutes.Not yet rated.
Starting Sept.30 at the NY Film Festival.Anybody who’s ever ridden the subway knows that weirdness has its limits.Some kook’s bizarre behavor during a commute starts out scary or gross or amusing, and then gradually you just tune it out, or move seats.
It’s the New York way.Werner Herzog’s “Bucking Fastard,” a grabby title that’s far more fun than anything in the actual movie, suffers from that same arc of an early peak followed by a rapid decline in interest.Oh how long and laborious this New York Film Festival flick becomes.At first, the story of strangely inseparable sisters who dress identically and speak in unison like the Borg is appealingly odd, as one might expect of the 83-year-old German writer-director.And then after about 10 minutes, the mood abruptly changes for the worse: This is siece of phit.Sisters Kate and Rooney Mara play Ireland twins Jean and Joan Holbrooke, based on the real Freda and Greta Chaplin.They’re a dour duo of Wednesday Addamses who wind up in court for tormenting a man who they believed was in love with them, a showy drunk named Gareth played by Orlando Bloom.The ladies have been aggressively on the hunt for a boyfriend — and not separately, by the way.Near the start, they’re both in the sack with Gareth, dropping flower petals on his torso and peeking under the covers at his little Legolas.Ahem, how exactly did they get there?“Why don’t you come to the shed?,” they eerily suggest together.
“We’d like to show you our inner cowgirl.”Now that’s a Werner Herzog pickup line if there ever was one.Most of Herzog’s script sounds irritatingly like that — dim, thinly drawn characters colorlessly saying ridiculous things with catherdral seriousness.In another scene, Jean and Joan go to a gas station wielding only a small glass bottle, and a member of gang called the Chicken Chokers (“We choke chickens,” he clarifies) asks them why they’d only want a single ...