Ben himself is quite a piece of work, and it's to Novak's credit that we eventually dig past Ben's buzzwords and NPR-ready voice and see the character's self-loathing (and, it would appear, the filmmaker's) at realizing that he's a prisoner of the same limited thinking he decries. Intriguingly, though, even as "Vengeance" checks box after box on the op-ed chart of American shorthand, it also presents a number of characters with idiosyncrasies and layers that we've never seen in a movie before. The inhabitants of said wasteland are people whose favorite restaurant is Whataburger and have several guns in the house for every person (including the kids) and use them to settle their differences rather than calling 911. On one side of the great divide is a nation of "coastal elites" (driven by Harvard-educated Jewish people like Ben) who name-drop cultural tidbits that they learned in college and never revisited sneer at monogamy, and think everything between the coasts that's not a Top Ten city is a barbaric wasteland. Like "The Daily Show" and its many imitators-and like Jon Stewart's recent film " Irresistible"-this is a movie that chastises its protagonist and the "red state" people he engages with for failing to look beyond the clichés they're fed by their own self-enclosed media loops, while at the same time dining out on them. And yet, true to media form, they embrace the templates, tropes, and clichés anyway. If Ben’s creative vision sounds like the kind of navel-gazing blather that you'd hear on a true crime podcast in which an actual person's murder becomes a springboard for brunchy rumination on law and truth and the nature of yadda yadda by a group of Ivy League college graduates based in Brooklyn, well, Ben is aware that he's sliding towards that cliché-and so is Eloise, who early on makes a joke to the effect that Ben is the only white man in America without a podcast. (As Eloise, Issa Rae works wonders with a thinly written role.) Intrigued by the possibility of writing the equivalent of a great American novel in the form of a podcast (he even name-checks Truman Capote's In Cold Blood) Ben decides to stick around to gather material for an audio series, which will be created under the supervision of his friend Eloise, a New York-based podcast editor for a National Public Radio-like organization. The desire for vengeance, we are told, is exclusively a backward-looking urge. Modern technology, he says, allows every person to exist in every moment except the present if they so choose. But the notion begins to seem more plausible once he starts talking to the family and slotting them into his prefabricated East Coast media-industrial-complex notions of "red state" and "blue state" people, and spinning his theories about temporal dislocation. Smith-Cameron). Then Ty tells Ben that Abby was murdered, probably by a Mexican drug dealer named Sancholo ( Zach Villa), and asks if he'll help the family seek, well, you know.īen is a narcissist who seems to view every relationship and experience as a way of raising his status as a writer and quasi-celebrity, so it seems unbelievable at first that he'd travel to Texas to attend the funeral of a woman he didn't really know. Somehow he ends up letting himself be talked into traveling to Abby's hometown, attending her funeral, and commiserating with her grieving family, which also includes her younger sisters Paris ( Isabella Amara) and Kansas City ( Dove Cameron), her kid brother El Stupido (Elli Abrams Beckel), and her mother Sharon (J. But a quick check of his phone confirms that he did indeed have sex with an aspiring singer named Abby ( Lio Tipton) a few times and then forgot about her. He's a player who hooks up with many women. Ben doesn't have a girlfriend named Abby.
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