Despite the imprimatur of enthusiasts like
Quentin Tarantino, there's hardly any place for accomplished low-budget genre
trash in American theaters these days, so the fact that Stuart Gordon's
savagely funny black comedy Stuck is getting released at all speaks to its quality.
The hook is a doozy, ripped from a tabloid headline that sounds like urban
legend: Back in 2003, a woman from Ft. Worth was involved in a hit-and-run
incident in which she struck a homeless man with her car and left him to die in
her garage for two days with his head lodged in the windshield. This sounds
like the makings of a lurid psychodrama, but Gordon (whose career includes the
cult favorite Re-Animator and the underrated David Mamet adaptation Edmond) lets his imagination run
wild and extends an already juicy premise into even pulpier territory.
Donning cornrows for a white-trash edge,
Mena Suvari stars as a nurse whose compassion apparently ends at a nursing
home, where she's vying for a big promotion. On a Friday night, she goes out
partying with her friends, takes a hit or two of ecstasy, drinks her weight in
martinis, and stumbles to her car. Meanwhile, a homeless man, played by superb
character actor Stephen Rea (familiar from Neil Jordan films like The Crying
Game and The
End Of The Affair),
lumbers to a mission shelter after getting booted from a park bench. When their
paths literally collide, Suvari doesn't know how to react; she ponders calling
for help (and assures him repeatedly that help is on the way), but she doesn't
want to get in trouble. So she leaves him in her garage and tries to go about
her business.
The callousness and casual disregard for
human life displayed by Suvari and several other characters, major and minor,
recalls Larry Clark's Bully, though Gordon's film is much more purposeful.
Though it takes a little time to find its groove—the hilarious
opening-credits sequence notwithstanding—Stuck picks up a lot of comic
momentum once the situation gets more desperate and absurd. The original
true-life story gained some ink as a particularly ripe example of dumb
self-interest and moral and intellectual vacuity. Gordon ingeniously converts
it into a vicious satire on man's inhumanity to man, all while holding the
requisite tension of a drive-in-ready horror/thriller. It's a righteously nasty
piece of work, and a rare example of a movie that traffics in B-movie grime
without a trace of Grindhouse-style self-consciousness.