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- "The Paperboy", Pete Dexter

Continuing our series of writers highlighting unfairly criticised films is a defence of Lee Daniels’ starry and steamy noir

“To begin, a confession of professional negligence: I wasn’t at the now-notorious first Cannes press screening of Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy, where critics booed and bayed for blood with a vigour and volume exceptional even at a festival famed for feisty audience participation. Instead, having overslept and woken with a customary rosé hangover, I dragged myself to the rather more serene and less-attended catchup screening next door, which traditionally starts half an hour later. Perhaps it’s a false memory, but I could swear I recall hearing a general tremor of discontent from outside early into the show.

(…)

There may have been some complicit giggles mixed in amid the furious catcalls, but by that afternoon, the narrative had been set: Daniels’ sultry American-gothic thriller, the follow-up to his acclaimed, Oscar-graced Precious, was a calamity and an offence, a piss-stain on the reputation of its director, its all-star cast, and the highbrow festival that hosted its premiere. Paperboy-related punchlines became the sport of the festival, as critics competed to nail the most damning takedown: “Lee Daniels: worst film-maker of our time, or worst film-maker of all time?” mused the AV Club’s Mike D’Angelo, perhaps winning that particular race.

There was just one problem, in my view: The Paperboy was genuinely good, in a way that was admittedly hard to quantify at a festival where it was stacked up against the likes of Michael Haneke’s Amour and Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone. Daniels’ fully haywire adaptation of Pete Dexter’s eerie, elegiac crime novel wasn’t shooting for prestige, but the elusive euphoria of high camp, its every provocation – and let it be said, Nicole Kidman peeing on Zac Efron might not even crack the top five loopiest things to happen in this humid cinematic daiquiri – aiming to aggravate, arouse and confuse in equal measure.

(…)

Daniels, in turn, immerses his audience in these alligator-snapping goings-on with the lascivious glee of a tabloid editor, while the actors – most of all, an extraordinary, brazenly against-type Kidman – commit dementedly to the cause. But The Paperboy defies us to care for them, which is partly what prompted those lusty boos: perched somewhere tipsily between Tarantino and John Waters, it’s exploitation cinema in the most unapologetically lurid and grandly enjoyable sense. (Among the film-makers who previously expressed interest in Dexter’s novel, fascinatingly, was Pedro Almodóvar: what subversive queer dog-whistle was embedded in its terse prose?)

Daniels has made far more noble-minded films, from the punishing abuse chronicle Precious to the stodgy historical diorama The Butler to this year’s Oscar-nominated The United States vs Billie Holiday, all variously undone by his innate, conflicting aesthetic affinity for the tacky. In The Paperboy, however, he set out to make trash first and foremost, smuggling in some burning sexual and political nuances along the way, and made the best film of his career: I’ve seen it three times since, finding new flavors in its strange, chaotic stew on each occasion. Credit to the Cannes selectors for getting it right first time and calling its bluff: it’s a glistening polyester outrage that knows exactly what it’s doing, which is to give every appearance of the opposite.”

#paperboy #lee daniels #pete dexter #nicole kidman

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