Rubber is Two Great Ideas That Never Fully Blend
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Rubber is the story of a telekinetic, murderous, self-aware car tire and a meditation on film itself and whether it needs to have 'meaning'. Now if only those two ideas actually mixed well...
Written by James "Crypticpsych" Lasome
April 9, 2011
Movie Trailer
Image Gallery
Release: November 10, 2010 (France), April 1, 2011 (Limited US Theatrical)
Written and Directed by: Quentin Dupieux
Starring:
Stephen Spinella as Lieutenant Chad
Jack Plotnick as Accountant
Wings Hauser as Man in Wheelchair
Roxanne Mesquida as Sheila
Meet Robert. Robert is a tire. Not only that, Robert is a sentient tire. As he rolls through the desert one day, he discovers that, when he can’t just roll over or crush something in his path, he has another way of fixing his problems. He finds that if he stares at something (or someone) for long enough and concentrates… he can telekinetically blow its head up. For some reason never made quite clear, he decides to follow a pretty woman named Sheila (Mesquida) and try to kill her, leaving a slew of exploded brains in his wake and a police force led by Lt. Chad (Spinella) chasing after him.
Meanwhile, Lt. Chad and a mysterious man with a bicycle called the Accountant (Plotnick) have also brought a group of people out into the mountains overlooking the desert. After an excellent monologue in which Chad talks about the importance of “no reason” in filmmaking and life, the group is given binoculars and begins to watch Robert' quest. They comment on everything Robert does and seem to be watching the movie play out. Is the viewer watching a movie? A movie within a movie? A movie about a movie? A movie about people watching a movie?
When Rubber ended, the first thought that went through my head (and had been for much of the
film) was “What in the holy blue Hell did I just watch”. It’s tough to articulate a “like” or a “dislike” for the film. On one hand I appreciate what it’s TRYING to do and admit I enjoyed and laughed at a fair bit of it. On the other, there’s a reason no one sets out to make a “no reason” film: because when you do that, by its nature, the majority of the film makes no sense. In other words, these two plot ideas, while well-done individually, never blend together into a cohesive whole.
In terms of Rubber’s better points, the concept of the telekinetic tire, on its own, works decently. The “rolling under its own power” effect works quite well and the head explosions are all suitably gory and very well done. The acting is also generally very good with Spinella and Robert the Tire stealing the show. Spinella’s performance seems to blend the “cop going after the villain” archetype with the fact that he clearly knows he’s acting in a movie. Some of his best scenes, in fact, are the ones in which he breaks the Fourth Wall (the opening and a sequence where he tries to convince his battalion of cops that the movie isn’t real being the best two examples). Robert, on the other hand, is able to show numerous human emotions without actually having a face or a voice. If Dupieux had chosen to make Rubber simply about Robert and the cops and nothing more, he probably would’ve had a cult classic on his hands.
Rubber’s “meta” aspect (the viewing audience) also works well. The members of the crowd act in exactly the same ways as typical people in a theater watching the film would act. They comment on the hotness of Sheila, the gore effects, and the craziness of what’s being seen in the film. The problem is, about midway through, Dupieux finds a way to basically drop the “viewing audience” storyline (an admittedly amusing way, to be fair). If he’d kept them around the whole time and integrated them more effectively, it’s possible the movie would’ve been better. As it is, it seems more like an unfocused movie about a psychotic tire with a well-done, yet pointless, artsy subplot.
This lack of focus carries over into every aspect of the film and hurts the overall product severely. I understand the concept of “no reason” filmmaking… the opening explains it, verbally and visually, brilliantly. Movies aren’t meant to be exclusively that way though. Apparently, if Rubber is any indication, it leads to movies that truly have “no point”. 
I’m not supposed to have unanswered questions like the reason Robert’s after Sheila. I’m not supposed to wonder exactly why the heck Robert is telekinetic or how the cops are following him in the first place (other than “it’s a movie” or “no reason”). It’s true I can “follow” the movie, but, without a point and with THIS MUCH “no reason”, I have no connection to the plot and still somehow feel completely lost. I’ve seen worse movies, and I’ve seen better movies. I’ve never seen a movie do so much right in terms of its storylines yet utterly fail to mesh together.
Overall, I understood Rubber… I just didn’t care. Its telekinetic tire storyline and attempts at statements about life and cinema do work well on their own. Unfortunately, they never combine to make a worthwhile final film. In the end, it’s worth a rental to be able to say that you watched a tire blow up people’s heads with its mind, but, beyond that, something this weird just doesn’t work as the grand “artistic statement” it’s trying to be.
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