Film Reviews

The Big White

• Rating:
• Director: Mark Mylod
• Starring: Holly Hunter
• Details: US, 100mins, 15s.

Finding a corpse in a dumpster in his small town in Alaska, down-on-his-luck travel agent Paul Barnell (Williams) spots a way out of his financial difficulty by pretending that the body is his long-lost brother, who has been missing for five years, so he can cash in on the life assurance. Taking the corpse to a remote woodland, Paul stuffs it full of fresh meat and throws it off a cliff with the hope that the wolves will eat him. When the body is found with Paul's brother's ID in his wallet, Paul goes to the Insurance Company to collect the cheque but ambitious salesman Ted (Ribisi) suspects something is going on. Before he does, though, the two gangsters (Tim Blake Nelson and W. Earl Brown) who disposed of the body in the dumpster need the corpse to confirm the hit with their boss and so kidnap Paul's wife (Hunter) for a share in the insurance money. But when Paul's real brother, the psychotic Raymond (Harrelson), turns up, everything goes pear-shaped.
It's clear from the outset, with incompetent hitmen, insurance scams, bungled kidnappings and a dark sense of humour, that we're in Fargo territory and writer Collin Friesen does himself no favours in giving his madcap story a frozen backdrop, as he must have known that comparisons to the Coens' classic will be unfavourable. But where he tries to distance himself from Fargo, which got its laughs from character-based lines, The Big White trusts in punch lines and crazy situations that border on slapstick for the guffaws. And there are quite a few of those. Friesen also switches from hilarity to pathos and back again without losing the story's thrust, and in Williams - an actor who can pull off both - he is vindicated. Williams is supported well by Ribisi, whose selfish, suspicious insurance agent almost steals the show, while the kooky Hunter and Harrelson on overdrive have the most fun.

Review by Gavin Burke