Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:
Has Billy Crudup ever successfully portrayed an ordinary human being? There's something vaguely otherworldly about the guy — a guileless quality that makes him best suited for playing befuddled innocents, like the childlike heroin addict Fuckhead in Jesus' Son. Pretty Bird, the directorial debut of equally oddball actor Paul Schneider (All the Pretty Girls), finds Crudup in full-on Ed Wood mode as a gladhanding entrepreneur who persuades a buddy with a large savings account (David Hornsby) and an unemployed aerospace engineer (Paul Giamatti) to help him build a futuristic "rocket belt." For a while, Crudup's deliberately stilted line readings and panoply of quizzical expressions are amusing enough to carry the film, especially given Giamatti's apoplectic support and a typically stonefaced comic turn from SNL's Kristen Wiig. Thing is, though, Schneider based his screenplay on a true story, one that takes a surprisingly dark turn. Major characters wind up dead, kidnapped and imprisoned. And yet the film's tone never really wavers from goofball geniality. Schneider presents us with a gaggle of one-dimensional caricatures, then expects us to actually care about what happens to them; as the disjunction between style and content grows wider and wider, the actors' antics — Crudup's in particular — start to feel laborious. File this one under Fascinating Failure, and mark Schneider down as a talented eccentric who needs someone a little more grounded, à la David Gordon Green, to prevent him from escaping Earth's atmosphere.