Sisyphus had it easy compared to
Scott Prendergast, the hapless sad-sack protagonist of Kabluey. What's a little boulder-rolling
compared to the unenviable task of passing out fliers for a failing dot-com
while standing in a lonesome field, wearing a blue costume that makes him look
like a Peanuts character
re-imagined as a creepy, featureless blue blob? Rarely has an independent film
benefited so greatly from a single piece of costume design. In his blue-man
getup, Prendergast is simultaneously a droll, understated walking sight gag and
a strangely lyrical component of a hauntingly spare landscape.
Making the leap to feature films
after several shorts, writer-director Prendergast plays his character as a
directionless man-child who moves in with his sullen sister-in-law (Lisa
Kudrow) to help look after her two monstrous children until his brother returns
from an extended tour in Iraq. To help with the bills, Prendergast gets the
aforementioned job as a costumed weirdo and quickly evolves from an aimless, overgrown
child in a silly blue suit to a self-actualized, more assertive overgrown child
in a silly blue suit.
Kabluey is in many ways an archetypal indie
quirkfest about the meandering, surreal misadventures of a sad-eyed drifter and
the kooky comic universe he inhabits. While lurking semi-inconspicuously in the
costume at a party, Prendergast learns that his sister-in-law has been cheating
on his brother with her sleazy boss (Jeffrey Dean Morgan); though the getup has
no eyes or mouth, Prendergast is able to communicate volumes through body
language alone. While the film's social-satire elements are flat and overly
familiar, its dry absurdity is unmistakably Lynchian—or at the very
least, Northfork-ian.† Prendergast has a keen visual sense and
a gift for offbeat gags, but it's ultimately all about the suit, which makes
both the man-child and this affecting little sleeper. In costume and character,
Prendergast is a little funny and more than a little sad. So is the film.