Stuart Gordon's Remarkable But Too Brief Film Career Ended on a High Note with the Bleakly Funny 2007 Drama Stuck
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch and then write about in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
We have come to another bittersweet ending. I’ve had the honor and pleasure of watching Stuart Gordon’s complete filmography, as well as his television work, for a very appreciated patron.
2007’s Stuck is Gordon’s final film but it is not the final Gordon project I will be writing about here. That honor instead belongs to a much less substantial project: Bleacher Bums, a filmed production of a play about Cubs fans that the theater maverick turned cult filmmaker co-wrote with, among others, Joe Mantegna, Dennis Franz, frequent Gordon collaborator Dennis Paoili and Gordon’s actress/writer wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon.
I probably don’t have to cover that particular obscurity, but I’ve had so much fun with this project that I don’t want it to end.
Gordon didn’t die until 2020. That means that one of the greatest horror filmmakers of all time and a man who could do wonders with a tiny budget didn’t get a film made in the final decade of his remarkable life.
I’ve now seen Stuck three or four times. I reviewed it at the time of its release and then covered it alongside The Re-Animator for my First and Last column at the late, lamented TCM Backlot. I personally lament the site’s passing because it paid me money in exchange for work. That was great. I miss it.
I’m consequently very familiar with Gordon’s darkly funny take on the tragic real-life tale of Gregory Glenn Biggs, a homeless man who was struck by the car of Chante Jawan Mallard, who inconveniently happened to be drunk and high on ecstasy.
The cursed soul remained stuck in the windshield even though the woman who struck him was a nursing student who probably could have saved the man’s life if she’d driven him to the hospital instead of waiting for him to die.
The man Mallard struck was a construction worker in his thirties instead of a production manager down on his luck, but otherwise, the film sticks fairly closely to the details of the story that inspired it.
That makes Stuck one of Gordon’s most horrifying films because its bleakness comes from the sick joke that is reality rather than the vivid imaginations of H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe.
I watched this last night with my wife. She was both disturbed and engaged by it. I couldn’t tell her that it was just a movie because it was rooted in real life.
Gordon is a horror filmmaker. Stuck is one of his most resonant and powerful horror films because it’s not about mummies or vampires or Frankenstein monsters but rather the horrors of capitalism and the way it brings out the worst in us.
The title has multiple meanings. On a literal level, Stuck is about a poor man who is hit by a car and then gets stuck in its windshield. On a more metaphorical level, Gordon’s darkly funny final film is about people stuck in lives that they do not want and a system that does not work, or rather a series of different systems that individually and collectively crush spirits and destroy lives.
Mena Suvari, of American Pie, American Beauty, and movies that do not have “American” in the title, is a revelation as Brandi Boski. By day, she cleans up feces and attends to the needs of the residents of a particularly depressing retirement home. By night, she tries to forget the misery and sacrifice of her job by getting drunk and doing MDMA at a club with her big-talking drug dealer boyfriend Rashid (Russell Hornsby).
Tom Bardo (Stephen Rea), meanwhile, is a sad-eyed middle-aged man who lost his middle-class life as a project manager when he was laid off. As the film opens, he is kicked out of his room in a broken-down boarding house for non-payment. To make matters worse, he’s told that he can’t take his clothes or his belongings with him until he pays what he owes.
The weary survivor’s Kafkaesque nightmare continues when he goes to an employment office in the hope of bettering his life and is treated with poisonous condescension by a soulless bureaucrat more interested in following meaningless rules to the letter than in helping people in need.
Tom is reduced to sleeping on a park bench but even that microscopic consolation is taken from him by a police officer who sternly informs him that the park is closed.
Just when it seems like Tom’s existence cannot get any worse Brandi hits him with her car while on all sorts of illegal drugs. But rather than bounce off the hood and onto the ground he’s stuck in the windshield and bleeding profusely.
Brandi is faced with an impossible dilemma. Does she do the right thing and get Tom help even if it means a lengthy potential prison stint or does she try and hide her transgression and risk killing a man whose only crime is being in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Suvari’s anti-hero is professionally selfless. She does the kind of job no one else wants but when she hits Tom self-preservation trumps doing the right thing.
Gordon (who also wrote the story) has Brandi almost do the right thing by dropping Tom off at a hospital or calling 911, but her understandable fear of spending the best years of her life in prison makes her selfish to a monstrous degree.
Rea is heartbreaking as a good man who just wants to be treated with dignity and compassion but encounters only icy judgment and cruelty. Bleeding profusely while being lodged in a windshield in a garage in a poor neighborhood might just represent a fate worse than death, but despite his crummy existence, his will to live is strong. He needs to exhibit preternatural resilience in order to have even a distant chance at making it out of his waking nightmare alive.
When the stakes are non-existent, Rashid can talk a big game about all the badass things he’s done, but when actually confronted with a genuine crisis, his brash self-assurance disappears, and he freaks the fuck out.
Stuck would be unbearably grim if it were not so funny. It’s the darkest of dark comedies, an unforgettable little movie about two suffering souls whose will to survive pits them against one another.
Brandi is sympathetic and relatable until she goes from being a morally compromised anti-hero to an outright villain.
For all of its darkness, Stuck is ultimately filled with compassion, humanity, and empathy. We feel Tom’s pain on a visceral level. That compassion is not limited to the unthinkable physical agony he experiences during the many hours he’s stuck in a windshield, bleeding profusely and just barely hanging on to life.
It’d be difficult, if not impossible, for someone with a soul not to feel for Tom and his desire to be treated like a human being. Gordon was a great director of actors, and Rea is among the best he ever worked with.
If Gordon had cast his leading man of choice, Jeffrey Combs, here, we would have assumed that he was deeply evil and probably deserved to get hit with a car and then stuck in its windshield.
The Crying Game star brings a world-weariness and battered dignity to the role of a man who was being fucked mercilessly by life even before he had to endure excruciating physical trauma.
Stuck is the antithesis of nihilism. Nihilism holds that the world is a flaming garbage fire, so there’s no point in caring about anyone or anything. Gordon’s final film instead posits life as extremely valuable. That’s why it is essential to care about other people as well as yourself.
Gordon’s final masterpiece is a very human film about two flawed people stuck in a world without much use for them. I am legitimately angry that Gordon couldn’t get a movie made during the final thirteen years of his life, but at least his extraordinary career began and ended on a high note with The Re-Animator and Stuck, two very different films that could only have come from the wonderfully warped mind of a true fright master.
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