Country: United States
Genre: Suspense/ Action
Director: Roger Avary
Year: 2004

Rating:


TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE

Fourteen years after I first saw Killing Zoe, I still remember the climactic moment in great detail. That’s one way to measure the resonance of a picture.

In some ways Killing Zoe is a very simple movie. Zed (Eric Stoltz), a safecracker by profession, goes to Paris for a bank job at the behest of a childhood friend that he hasn’t seen for 11 years, Eric (Jean-Hugues Anglade). Zed arranges for a prostitute for the evening, who turns out to be Zoe (Julie Delpy). Against all reason, they make an emotional connection, which is rudely interrupted by Eric, who barges into Zed’s hotel room uninvited.

As time goes on, it becomes more and more apparent that Zed’s childhood friend Eric is a few animal crackers short of a zoo. By the time Zed realizes his mistake, it’s too late, and he’s caught in Eric’s destructive wake. Will Zed and Zoe make it through the end credits?

That’s the story in a nutshell, but the core of Killing Zoe is really an extension of the Hitchcockian concept of a bomb ticking under a table, unnoticed by the people at the table. The audience slowly realizes that Eric is a raving loony, and the suspense comes from fearing for the safety of Zed and Zoe. We ask ourselves, when is Zed going to catch on?

It’s a tricky thing. Writer/director Roger Avary needs to make us like Zed (and Zoe), but at the same time, if Zed catches on too quickly, the movie is over. Avary is not entirely successful. Zed comes off as reasonably intelligent, so the only way that he could allow himself to be dragged along in Eric’s schemes against his better judgement would be if he were REALLY passive, and that’s just not all that sympathetic. Zed is called upon to be especially spineless in an early scene. It’s a good thing that Avary cast Eric Stolz and Julie Delpy, two intrinsically likable actors, but even they can’t completely overcome the conceptual problems with the script.

Roger Avary also does well, maybe too well, with his casting of Eric. Jean-Hugues Anglade is scary, slimey, and hateful as Eric. He’s a complete monster, but a rather believable one.

And that brings up another point. Other than the rather odd passivity of Zed’s character, Roger Avary’s writing has admirable verisimilitude. The scene where Zed and Zoe connect is a minefield, but Avary negotiates it with aplomb.

Many have noted that Quentin Tarantino executive produced Killing Zoe, and think that the tone of the movie is largely due to Quentin, but you have to remember that Pulp Fiction was based on stories by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary. They were writing partners, so it’s only natural that they had similar interests. I find that Roger Avary’s dialog is more believable, more subtle, less showy and tongue-in-cheek than Quentin Tarantino’s. That doesn’t make it better, just different.

Others might object to later scenes in the bank, which disintegrate into chaos. One critic likened the entertainment value of Killing Zoe to watching a hose whipping around randomly spraying passerby with water. But that’s the point in a way. Beneath the simple plot, Roger Avary is attempting something more ambitious. He is depicting an accelerated version of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which says that organized systems tend to decay into chaos over time. That depiction extends over the running time of almost the entire movie. In the latter stages of the bank robbery, the movie actually slows down, almost like the sound of a record player that has been shut off while it’s still playing.

As an audience, we might wish for a snappier pace as the movie approaches its climax, but Avary is not trying to make an action movie. He’s after psychological suspense and dread. Does he succeed? Put it this way: I enjoyed and appreciated Killing Zoe much more the second time around, even though I was watching a crappy pixelated version on a computer screen.

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