Like most movies that we expect to devolve into chaos before the characters we’re watching ever do, “The Death of Dick Long” begins with images of everyday, carefree life involving everyday, carefree people. Three friends shatter the serenity of a quiet rural evening with their rock music – “Pink Freud,” their band is apparently called, a hint at the imitation game the movie will deftly play – and we quickly learn that this, in fact, is what constitutes their serenity.
Zeke (Michael Abbott Jr.), Earl (Andre Hyland) and Dick (Daniel Scheinert, also the movie’s director) continue their night with an appropriately obtuse carousel of friendly redneck tomfoolery; drinking, smoking, lighting couches on fire, lighting fireworks from their crotches. They’re somehow able to keep their irresponsibility in check while resembling the kind of infantile thirty-somethings who always luck their way out of trouble. Or worse.
Our intuitions prove fruitful—moments later, they’re speeding—through red lights and through the middle of the night—Dick bleeding from somewhere in the back seat—Zeke and Earl panicking before leaving him collapsed and unconscious outside a hospital.
They’re in trouble, clearly, though Scheinert and the film’s writer, Billy Chew, leave it to the audience to piece together what exactly happened to make things go so south so fast, at the same pace that this small town’s small-town police force does, and why Zeke and Earl suspiciously abandoned a third of their trio.
If all this sounds like a familiar premise, it seems like Scheinert would be the first to tell you that it is. He formed one-half of the “Daniels” duo behind 2016’s bizarro-fest “Swiss Army Man,” but while that movie reveled in vibrant incredulity from its opening moments, “The Death of Dick Long” resembles something more sneakily candid for a long stretch.
The first half of this things-gone-clearly-astray backcountry tale feels like clear homage to the Coen Brothers, right down to the elegance cluelessness of its characters and everyone-knows-everyone small-town tension—if Frances McDormand’s police chief in “Fargo” had a cousin also in law enforcement, it has to be Janelle Cochran’s Southern-accented sheriff in “Dick Long.”
Chew’s taught writing and Scheinert’s out-in-the-open sense of suspense don’t leave you wondering if Earl and Zeke will be made out so much as who will be the one who trips over themselves into putting the pieces together, but the slap-your-forehead moments by virtually everyone involved never betray the legitimate dread of anticipation. I chuckled and shook my head when Zeke backs himself into literally handing over evidence to Sarah Baker’s scene-stealing Officer Dudley, and I also couldn’t help dreading when that mistake would inevitably come back to haunt him. “Yeah I guess we didn’t think that one through,” Earl says at one point. It’s the movie’s endlessly entertaining truth, and may as well be its tagline.
That duality of straight-faced mystery and humorous irony so pervades the movie that it allows eventual blasphemous revelations to creep up unsuspectingly – like a prankster leering you in with a scary story and lit flashlight before his buddy pops out from the bushes – eventually erupting in a symphony of melodrama and zaniness much more indicative of the filmmaker at work.
On “Swiss Army Man’s” sharp weirdness curve “Dick Long” does not live, but I absolutely guffawed at the deadpan delivery of the movie’s climaxing mystery—and followed it up by wondering how Scheinert made it so believable a twist in this otherwise unassuming world turned upside down by a seeming overnight murder.
The beauty of “Dick Long” is that its increasingly strange proceedings never feel abrasive to the characters. Much like how Scheinert and Dan Kwan maneuvered the weird warmth of “Swiss Army Man,” there’s an unexpected tinge of heart that fuels “The Death of Dick Long”—desperation to keep families together and ruminations on justice that the director is able to blend with the utterly perverse.
Neon blues and reds wash over Zeke’s face as the walls close in on him. He calmly defines profane slang to his young daughter, and the moment functions on an empathetic level. Creed and Nickelback don’t sound out of place alongside meditative piano ballads, putting music to a dichotomy that’s bizarre and beautiful—watching “The Death of Dick Long” is like licking honeysuckle only to suddenly find you’re inhaling on a Juul and not minding the difference.
A more asinine version of this movie exists where police pursue Earl and Zeke on a tractor or where the slow-peeling crudeness of the plot overwhelms its tenderness, but Scheinert isn’t aspiring to make the most balls-to-the-wall-unbelievable version of a stumble into crime. His latest is one that’s equal parts domesticated and appropriately feral.
"The Death of Dick Long is rated R for some pervasive language, disturbing sexual material and brief drug use. Leave the kids at home. There's nothing here to entertain them.
Starring: Michael Abbott Jr., Virginia Newcomb, Andre Hyland, Sarah Baker
Directed by Daniel Scheinert
2019
