Caffeine
Caffeine
is a story of a London coffee shop which is trying desperately to be hip and
quirky. The movie, not the café, though the employees and patrons do
definitely have the attitudes. Sadly, there is a strong whiff of sitcom
(and not the good attributes of the form, either, I’m afraid) to all that is
going on in this over-stuffed, under-brewed plot.
It’s too bad; the film
has a good cast going for it. A little heavy on the TV names, which may
count for the sitcom-y feel – but some talented people nonetheless. Sadly
they are kind of overwhelmed by so many plots and subplots and people that
no one really gets a chance to connect in any real way.
The Black Cat is supposed
to be a cool place to hang in a swankly disheveled London neighborhood. The
movie looks over the many eccentric employees and customers at the place,
supposedly opening up their lives and beliefs and worlds to us – though for
the most part, only their sex lives get a real airing.
The movie itself takes
place almost completely in the restaurant, so we do not actually experience
most of these peccadilloes, we just hear them discussed and gossiped about
ad nauseum by the self-obsessed characters.
The Black Cat is run by
Rachel (Marsha Thomason of Las Vegas), who has to deal with the
possibility of getting her dream job on the same day that her boyfriend the
chef (Callum Blue of Dead Like Me) cheats on her with twins. Of
course this leads to business problems as well as personal ones as she fired
the guy and has no one to cook. She does have a wait staff though. There
is a tough-as-nails local (Mena Suvari of American Beauty and
American Pie) who for some strange reason had to bring her demented
grandmother (Roz Witt) in to work. We also have a struggling wannabe
novelist (Breckin Meyer of Garfield) who spends more time trying to
reach his agent than serve people. Then there is the homosexual barkeep
(Mark Pellegrino) who is annoyed by the fact that he is the only one who
seems to be actually working.
If the employees are
quirky, the patrons are just weird. There are two old friends – one (Andrew
Ableson) who has “mistakenly” exposed himself to a young girl, so he
blackmails his lawyer friend that if he doesn’t represent him in court he
will tell the lawyer’s fiancée that he is a cross-dresser. A nice, quiet
girl (Katherine Heigl of Grey's Anatomy) gets set up on a completely unsuitable blind date (Daz
Crawford), while her commitment-phobic ex (Andrew Lee Potts) is completely
decompressing watching from across the room. A former porn actress (Sonya
Walger of Mind of the Married Man) tries to read her book, but keeps
getting interrupted by her jealous boyfriend.
Of course all this
raises a question – is flashing a twelve-year-old girl ever funny, even if
it is a mistake? (And the audience never totally buys into that
rationalization). For that matter, is it humorous for a grown man to have
an accident in his pants when he is threatened with a gun? Also, why is the
grandmother even there except for cheap laughs? She has no real part in the
story but keeps butting into scenes, raving about all sorts of strange
sexual practices. Is Alzheimer’s or dementia supposed to be a joke here,
too? The problem is too
many of the things here are vaguely shocking and taboo, but not necessarily
comic.
Strangely, several of
these actors – such as Heigl, Suvari and Pellegrino – are not British but
given fake accents (and in fairness, only Suvari’s working class bird-speak
tends to waver, the rest are not bad.) Also strangely, fellow American
Meyer doesn’t even bother with an accent – not that his being a Yank is
really explained or overly important to the role.
Then again, I have no
confirmation of this, but I did read an article that suggested that the film
was filmed in Los Angeles, not London. It sort of makes you wonder, then,
why even bother to set it in the UK? Are the accents supposed to give the
storylines gravity? If so, it doesn’t really work.
Then
again, not much of the movie does work. (4/07)
Jay
S. Jacobs
