oseph Fable (the aptly named Askew) is a repellent little office worker with staring eyes and an irritable, abrasive personality that leaves little doubt about why both his girlfriend, Liz (Winnick), and his dog would both leave him at about the same time. People frequently ask him if "she" has found her way home yet, which annoys him to no end when it turns out that they're always asking about the dog.
Fable's best friend, Alex (Nash), meets him often for lunchtime conversations that consist of little more than Fable complaining about all the people out to get him, and Alex telling him he really should get a grip.
Nobody else seems overly concerned with Fable's deteriorating emotional health, not his boss (Douglas Wert), who smiles though Fable's behavior, which is of the sort that would lead any reasonable person to expect a workplace shooting spree at any moment, and not Fable's psychiatrist, Dr. Frumkes (Pane), who reacts to Fable's steadily increasing paranoia by prescribing other ineffective medications. Fable starts suspecting Frumkes of sleeping with Liz.
Certain aspects of Fable's increasing madness begin to manifest in the real world. His fellow cubicle workers seem to be circulating a memo about him, which they stash away whenever he draws near. A mysterious man in black, carrying an armful of books, begins appearing at unpredictable moments. The yelps of a dog in distress go unheard by Fable but are audible to at least one of the people endangered by his insanity.
His story is regularly interrupted by a young girl acting as narrator, who tells a truly grim fairy tale about a lonely wolf whose life becomes a nightmare thanks to the evil machinations of a malicious, sadistic crow. This story is intended to resonate with Fable's, but how accurately? Is it echoing his imaginary sense of persecution? Or is there a true conspiracy, responsible for driving Fable around the bend?
A self-obsessed schlemiel
This much needs to be said. It is not only possible to center a powerful, compelling film on the mental deterioration of a repellent and delusional central character, but it has been done many times. Indeed, there's a movie in theaters right now, The Machinist, which does it quite well, generating a significant degree of suspense over the emotional health of a figure most of us would sensibly cross the street to avoid. Martin Scorsese managed much the same trick with his classic Taxi Driver.
It is, alas, just as possible to make a pretentious and not-very-interesting film based on such ingredients. And that's what Ari Kirschenbaum manages here.
The essential difference is that the madness depicted in those films, and others, reveals more and more layers as the stories of the afflicted develop. By contrast, Joseph Fable's madness is not exactly rich. From scene one, when he's just a little twitchy, to the final third, when he's become downright murderous, he's never anything more than an abrasive, pathologically jealous, self-obsessed little turd with a hair trigger and an attitude problem. He becomes more dangerous, of course, but that's not character development, at least not as it applies to him in particular. It's just turning up the volume, that's all. And he's not any more compelling as a kidnapper
and murderer than he was as the creepy guy who sat in a bar complaining about his girlfriend problems.
To put it another way: For much of the film, Fable's friend Alex serves the same function as the levelheaded best friend who used to endure the neurotic ramblings of the main character in Woody Allen comedies. The difference is, you can understand why that guy hung around with Woody Allen, who may have whined a lot, but who was at least capable of being interesting and funny much of the time. There's no evident reason why anybody would want to hang around with this guy. At all. Not even out of pity or horror.
This is not the fault of Desmond Askew, who brings a definite intensity to his performance as Fable. He also looks a little like the veteran character actor Brad Dourif, who has played more than his share of maniacs himself, and he has an equally creepy stare. But that stare is not enough, especially when the movie seems to think that the audience will be satisfied with closeups of that stare directed for small eternities at whatever Fable happens to be irritated about at any given moment. Though the film is less than 90 minutes long, viewers may be able to shave almost 20 minutes off its running time by playing the stare scenes at two or three times their offered speed. It's more than any audience could need or want. Pretentiousness of equal annoyance value—including far too many flashes of Fable's dog escaping his yard—sinks the dramatic impact throughout.
As for the fantasy element, largely limited to the fairy tale about the wolf and the crow, but also evident, a couple of times, with minor developments that cannot be entirely explained by Fable's madness: None of it enlivens the film at all.
