Review of Big White, The

Introduction

Paul (Robin Williams) is the owner of a failing travel agency in Alaska and is in debt up to his eyeballs as he tries to fund the medical expenses of his wife Margaret (Holly Hunter) who has, what appears to be, an undefined mental illness. As a last resort he tries to cash in his missing brother`s life insurance, but is told that the policyholder must be missing for seven years or a body must be produced as proof of death. Fortunately for Paul, a couple of criminals dump the body of a man they`ve just killed in a dumpster next to his travel agency and Paul sees this as the way out of his financial difficulties. However, the criminals` boss demands to see the body as proof that they have done their job and when they try to retrieve the body from the dumpster, they find that it has disappeared and work out that Paul has taken it. To compound Paul`s misery, an ambitious and relentless insurance investigator (Giovanni Ribisi) is entirely unconvinced that the body is that of Paul`s brother and is dead set on proving that Paul is lying.

Video

The anamorphic transfer shows the Alaskan landscapes very well and there is no sign of graining or any other blemishes in the film which is only several months old.

Audio

Surprisingly, there is only a 2.0 Dolby Stereo soundtrack which does the job well enough, but I would have expected a 5.1 mix to handle the dialogue and excellent soundtrack from Mark Mothersbaugh, who scored both The Life Aquatic and The Royal Tenenbaums. The soundtrack also features four songs by The Eels.

Features

The Director`s Commentary is a fairly standard `yak track` which covers all the bases of how the film was made, from casting to post-production and is pretty well delivered by Mark Mylod.

The `Adventures in Filmmaking` feature is a short `making of` with some interesting behind the scenes footage, but is neither comprehensive nor revealing enough to constitute a bona-fide `making of` feature.

The `Selected B-roll` is merely a 11-minute focus on the scene in the insurance office with Robin Williams and Giovanni Ribisi and shows you different takes and the interaction between the two men whilst shooting the scene.

The theatrical trailer rounds off the extra features.

The review disc did not have the `Anatomy of a Scene` feature, although I suspect that the `Selected B-roll` may have been it.

Conclusion

Mark Mylod, the director of the depressingly awful `Ali G Indahouse`, proves that lightening can strike twice and when you give a talented TV director a feature film to helm, they can either take to it like a fish to water, or prove woefully out of their depth. Unfortunately this is an example of the latter case and none of the cast do themselves any credit: Robin Williams seems only to have made perhaps one decent film (One Hour Photo) in the past ten years and is almost unwatchable when he plays `everyman` characters, Holly Hunter`s hypochondriac and manic Margaret conveys no sympathy for her condition at all and this seems to be a complete waste of her talent. Tim Blake Nelson and W. Earl Brown make an interesting pairing as the incompetent criminals who kidnap Margaret but do not have enough screen time and only Woody Harrelson seems to realise that the film is far from a masterpiece, as he completely hams it up playing Paul`s long-lost brother.

As I was watching this `comedy` (in which I didn`t laugh once), I was struck by the obvious comparison to the Coen brothers` fine black comedy Fargo, which is also centered around a broke and failing businessman, whose wife is kidnapped by a couple of inept criminals, a snowy landscape and a corpse that meets a grisly end. Unlike Fargo however, The Big White is badly written, badly directed and has a cast that should be ashamed they signed onto the project.