Cruel But Necessary (2007/Critical Mass/Somerville House DVD)
Picture: C Sound: C Extras: C Feature: C
When it
comes to documentaries, even the best ones have a point of view and are never
totally reality since even they have to pick and choose the footage shown. For those who consume reality TV or think
through cameras from phones, the Internet or camcorders, anything they tape is
all there is to see and offers some magical sense of truth. Saul Rubinek’s Cruel But Necessary (2007) is built on this false premise and
despite his best intentions, never really works.
Wendel
Meldrum plays a suburban housewife in a troubled marriage who finds out from
vacation video that her husband is having an affair. No, he was not stupid enough to tape himself
having sex with the other woman, but was
stupid enough to forget their camcorder had a build-in microphone and
inadvertently taped his portion of a conversion with that woman. Disgusted with what happened, one of her ways
to work it out is to tape everything in her life, even when she is not around
to be point of a peeping tom-like obsession to make sure this kind of mistake
never ruins her life again.
However,
this 92-minutes exercise becomes quickly repetitious, looses credibility
quickly and despite some ambitious performances, goes flat quickly. Rubinek has been a longtime character actor
and survivor in the business, so it is no surprise he would take a crack at
shooting behind-the-camera work, but this is just not that well thought out and
it gets nowhere fast. Too bad it was not
more of character study instead of an exercise in some gimmickry and high
concept ideas. Better luck next time.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image was obviously shot in lower def digital
video and it shows with lots of motion blur, some aliasing issues and the shaky
camera work makes it worse. The Dolby
Digital 2.0 sound is stereo at its rare best and can be a problem at times,
becoming monophonic. Extras include two
audio commentaries (one with Rubinek & Producer Elinor Reid, the other with
Meldrum), interviews, “cruel bits” and an audio interview with the producers.
- Nicholas Sheffo
