Normal Movie Review:
This is that time of the year. The 'appearances are deceptive' template is back, and what way to be back. Though not related to the Nobody films, Bob Odenkirk's starrer Normal comes like a discovery and a realisation that the template of an unlikely hero and disturbance in a suspiciously peaceful environment still has a second wind waiting. It is especially so after seeing Nobody 2 run out of plot points and place its bet on spectacle. But Normal, true to its title, settles for an ordinary treatment of a promising premise.
Normal begins in Osaka, Japan, where a Yakuza gang leader tests the endurance of his soldiers by making them cut their fingers. Those who make the cut (pun intended) are deputed to the fictional Minnesota town of Normal for an assignment. As the scene shifts to Normal, Sheriff Ulysses (Odenkirk) takes charge after the demise of Sheriff Gunthers. A very silent town, the place becomes very predictable for Ulysses in no time. But then a bank heist changes it all.
Normal capitalises on the popularly held belief that there is definitely something wrong where everything is perfectly ordinary. The mundaneness of the locale was established well and funnily. The cases that Ulysses got were a petty bargaining quarrel at a tool shop and the poor quality of yarn. Another strength of the film is its un-subtlety. Like people maintaining a composed exterior to shroud their anxieties, every place is named after the town: Normal tools, Normal bar, Normal bank, etc. Ulysses describes his life as the sheriff in the most boring and yawn-inducing manner. He keeps saying things like, 'I feel like a midwife with a gun,' 'This is a town of good people with small problems,' and 'most of my time is spent on shenanigans. It is natural to expect that whatever follows all this will be super explosive and fun to watch. Of course, there are explosions. Were they explosive? Yes, but it seemed it was lit on a rainy day or, like in the film, a snowy day.
The ideas, as one guy pitted against almost 2000 people (literally), having nowhere to run, the screenplay needed to be more tense and tight. Instead, the writing always gives Ulysses an easy way out, like a dangerously hanging advertisement board falling on cue or an ankle snare waiting to lift his enemy. The unfortunate thing about these tropes is that they don't even excite the cheap thrills as in films like Home Alone, these traps are set by the kid, and he deftly makes the bad guys walk into them. In Normal, all of these traps aren't those that they really become, and there is no action on the part of the protagonist. This lazy choice makes all the proceedings look phenomenally normal.
Bob Odenkirk as Ulysses is endearing, not for anything special that the character offers. But Odenkirk's poker face suggests he just wants to live a laid-back life, and his fighting reluctantly only to restore that pre-conflict peace, makes Ulysses likeable. Normal has maintained this consistency in line with the actor's Nobody films. With Ulysses saying that after that one decision he took went miserably wrong, he sat on the sidelines and merely watched lives; the personal stakes should have been higher. The demons of his life that keep chasing him needed to be more pronounced. Aspects like these required more work to make up for the convenient writing choices, such as the people who roam freely despite the Yakuza taking over the town. An aplomp person with a fiery past is a trope that would have fit perfectly into this space, but the writers bungle with it.
The protagonist is named after Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem. The poem's theme of a king restlessly refusing to settle for his quiet life, taking a journey “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” also suits the stubborn, ceaseless, yet vain writing effort. Ulysses' (in the film) mission to leave a place like how he found it does have a meta ring to it. Audiences at the start of the film came with expectations of a Nobody-like trigger-happy entertainment, and left it as they found it, with expectations. Normal.