June 23, 1998

I wish I wasn't so tired when I saw The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati, because you need a good dose of caffeine to get through it. I'm not trying to say it's boring. I mean, sure, there's nothing about a cockroach in it, or even the mention of a bug eating Cincinnati - which might have helped wake me up more. But that's not the case. It's just that the film is exhausting; so much so that I was hoping for an intermission about half way through it.

Cockroach stars Alan Williams (who also wrote the script, based on his series of stage plays entitled, "The Cockroach Trilogy") as The Captain, a local legend in Windsor, a city suburb of Detroit, who was once a stand-up comedian before he disappeared from the public eye.

At the film's beginning, an amateur film crew (Deborah Drakeford and Oliver Dennis) rediscovers The Captain and decides to make a documentary about him. They are fascinated by him and are even more fascinated by his stories and rantings. From that point, the film enters a film within a film conceit, with The Captain, a champion of rant if I've ever heard one (Dennis Miller: Watch out!), at the center of things.

The Captain rants about all sorts of things, mainly his time in the 1960's, seeing band after band, doing drug after drug, living the life. He's crass, he's loud, he's angry, but he's also, for some reason, extremely likable. I can't quite explain it.

But he's quite a concoction. In the beginning of the film, he says something to the effect of, "There are only two types of filmmakers in the world: Those who love people and tell their stories and those who hate people and have nothing but manifestos to share." As the movie moves on, and The Captain rants away about all sorts of things (there's a particularly inspired section where he discusses the meaninglessness of Bob Dylan's lyrics), the movie builds a strong sense of pathos for The Captain: Here is a man who belongs to both sides of his argument. He hates peoples and has many theories to share, but at the same time, he's a person who has created his own alienation and just wants to come back to civilization. As a result, he's not just a person feuding with society but a person feuding with himself, schizo to the core.

As the movie progresses, the Captain's behavior becomes more and more odd, and I felt more and more pity for him. Here was a pop culture enthusiast, a man who tried his hardest to stay atop of things, but he learned in a very hard way that pop culture is fleeting and to follow it too closely is to loose sight of reality.

It's a great complexity here presented both in and underneath the monologues, but the problem is that all the ranting grows tiresome after a while. The stories (perhaps intentionally?) lose their focus, snap back to things, get lost again. It's like Spalding Gray, only more acerbic and without the pleasant voice and the loving humor. In fact, the second act of the movie literally turns into a Spalding Gray movie, complete with a desk, water pitcher, and image screen. The act's staging, I suppose, is intended to parody Gray's style, but for what reasons, I'm not sure. Also, for a parody, the scene goes on much too long. (Coincidentally, this act also gives us the best of the Captain's stories, a long diatribe about The Captain's seeing a local Goth band called Trevor and the Golden Gates of Destruction, which is both hysterical and pathetic at the same time.)

I'm not sure exactly where I got lost. Alan Williams does a fine, complex job as The Captain, despite his English/Scottish hybrid accent getting a little thick at times, and the plot twist about The Captain's real identity, revealed near the film's end, produces genuine sadness for the character. But when this twist is revealed, I could not help but wonder how much greater the effect could have been-and how much easier it could have been to swallow - if The Captain's story had been dramatized rather than simply told. After all, they do say in all the places: Show don't tell. Here, it might have made things much more compelling.

I do have to credit director Michael McNamara for knowing how to keep things moving, though. For a movie about one guy talking, it has a great sense of pacing. The opening scenes of this movie particularly, when the film crew discovers The Captain, are hypnotic. McNamara's framing of his shots reminded me a lot of Mean Streets era Scorcese and his use of sounds has a way of undercutting the mood in just the right way.

McNamara, in a Q&A following the screening, talked about a video and television (cable) release being talked about for this movie. I hope that happens. Maybe, when I'm more awake, I'll check it out again, with lots of coffee nearby, so I won't miss a beat.

Eyal Goldshmid I am a fiction writer supporting myself as a government clerk for the US army. Until I can fully live off writing, I plan to milk all the luxury I can from the American taxpayer. Other Articles I've Written