Ryan Reynolds has tried everything. He’s done gross-out comedy in Van Wilder, intellectual posturing in The Nines and mega-budget action in R.I.P.D. He’s one of relatively few actors to play both Marvel and DC superheroes (Deadpool and the Green Lantern respectively) and, in 2011, he narrated a film about a whale. Yet to many he remains difficult to place: a forgettable midpoint on the spectrum of Hollywood’s famous Ryans, slap bang between Gosling and Phillippe.
Nonetheless, Reynolds is clearly a likable man and a capable actor, which perhaps explains why directors from Tarsem Singh to Atom Egoyan are still keen to work with him. Out this week on DVD, The Voices sees him unite with Persepolis director Marjane Satrapi for what will surely go down as the strangest chapter in either’s career.
Reynolds plays Jerry, a factory worker whose failure to take his medication thrusts him into a permanent state of hallucination, in which life’s edges are pleasingly softened, and his pets Bosco and Mr Whiskers are transformed into surprisingly good conversationalists. At first, all this strikes a somewhat chintzy tone, but after a few dark turns (spoiled wholesale by the film’s DVD art) The Voices reveals a seamy underbelly that quickly mesmerises.
Together with screenwriter Michael R Perry, Satrapi successfully calls Hollywood out on its casual use of mental illness as a throwaway plot device, granting Jerry a complex inner life that humanises him even as his behaviour grows increasingly inhumane. That said, mental health activists already weary of cinema’s conflation of schizophrenia and murderousness will likely find little solace in a feature-length reiteration of the trope, even if it is for the purposes of wry genre critique.
Still, if anyone can smooth things over, it’s Reynolds, whose hitherto nebulous identity as an actor allows him to perform the kind of tonal leaps and bounds that would make other people’s heads spin.
Also out this week
X-Men: Days Of Future Past – Rogue Cut Needless redux of superhero romp.
The Woman In Black 2 Needless haunted house sequel.
Tale Of The Princess Kaguya Needlessly adorable Ghibli animation.
