Zombieland
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Writers: Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
Producer: Gavin Polone
Stars: Woody Harrelson, Jessie Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, Amber Heard
I hope some day Ken Burns makes an epic documentary about zombies. I think by now they are as thoroughly woven into the fabric of America as jazz and baseball. In the four decades since George A. Romero created the American brand of zombie with Night of the Living Dead, it has become more than a movie monster. The word itself conjures so much about us – the zombie is the dull but ravenous consumer we can be at our worst, it provokes us about the ways we attempt to ignore or defy death, and it forces us to face how we cling to petty and superficial distractions when darker forces are marshalling.
It is also, when it wants to be – this pale, slack-jawed shadow self – bloody hilarious.
Zombieland can only be a comedy because zombies mean so much to us already. This marriage of mismatched buddy road movie with tongue-in-cheek ultra-violence is thoroughly zombie-literate, and can thus dispense with the niceties in favor of 81 minutes of raucous, beautiful vulgarities. It has no interest in bogging us down in consideration of these ghouls, it just wants to take us on a music-cranking, donut-turning joyride through the graveyard with them. It riffs over the horror gospel the way the Sex Pistols punked with My Way, and that mixture of rude surface and underlying impassioned respect makes it a joy for the faithful while showing the uninitiated what a cool place it is to be.
The why of this particular globe-circling zombie plague scarcely matters. We know the result by heart now – ninety-nine-point-several-nines percent of humanity ends up as either feasters or food in an orgy of screaming, slobbering cannibalism, leaving but a few heroes to navigate the wreckage, attempting to stay unbitten long enough to put another bullet in another pile of undead brains.
First we meet the young actor Jesse Eisenberg, who will eventually be looking for love at a far less friendly amusement park than he did in Adventureland. His character goes by the name Columbus – all the characters (save a thoroughly-spoilt-but-still-uproarious cameo by a famous actor) identify themselves by important cities in their lives, and all are likely to be the last residents of those cities. Columbus is a college student, a nerd, and a loner, and it was just another in a long string of romantic failures in his life when his beautiful but panicked neighbor (Amber Heard) took shelter in his arms, then tried to eat him.
But he has the right combination of luck, quirky hypochondria, and limberness (limberness is important) to have survived this long, and he lives by a series of zombie survival rules like Rule 31: “Check the back seat”, and Rule 17: “Don’t be a hero”. He’s the most earnest, shy, phobic OCD case to ever wield a shotgun.
He runs across another living human, the swaggering, wildly-emotive Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson). And because this is a movie, Tallahassee is Columbus’s reckless, irrational opposite in every way imaginable; and they have good reason to hang together despite their mutual dislike.
The closest parallel I can see to a character like this in Harrelson’s past filmography is when he played Larry Flynt. He’s an unhinged bundle of strange impulses with no check or filter and a lot of weapons. He is also an artist in the field of dispatching the undead; he exterminates not from fear but from creatively-stimulated gusto. It is not what you would call a rich performance, but it is a rather marvelous one because of his wild-eyed conviction.
The mismatched travelers eventually encounter two young sisters – Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), who are used to depending only on each other, and being able to hoodwink men. What amounts to a plot in between comic vignettes and gruesome kills is largely driven by Wichita’s bad decisions, which makes her the most-off-putting character, but also the most necessary if we’re going to get to that amusement park.
The true driving force to the movie is the screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick, which plays like a manically-inspired pile of ideas hammered into just enough of a narrative to pass inspection. They have thought of many rules for surviving zombies, many weapons with which to kill zombies, and many, many horrible ways to be killed by zombies. More than a few of those last ideas are assembled in a slow-motion opening credits sequence that plays like a hypnotizing freak show, designed to both desensitize you and warm up your inner Beavis-and-Butthead chuckles. They are sprinters in the modern vein, these zombies, and that runs against my purist’s streak. But I have to credit their tenacity – and their fashion sense.
Zombieland succeeds because it is so giddily self-aware; it knows it is hocking loogies from on the shoulders of giants. It is not hindered by its formulas but defined by them – why push boundaries when you have enclosed so much within them with which to wreak merry havoc? The American Zombie is an eternally-refreshing force for entertainment; in the final analysis, this is a movie about people from all walks of life coming together, their uniqueness making them stronger as a team. And isn’t that just like jazz, and just like baseball?