[A Missionary Special Feature] He’s Complicated…

Elder Brock in Missionary is a complicated guy. In the simplest of terms he’s the villain of Missionary, but for me as a director, I have to relate to my antagonist most of all to tell a compelling story with him or her. I want to cry when they meet their end…or rejoice when they don’t. Because life is more complicated than good and evil. And for every bad choice, there’s a good reason behind it. And in films dealing with obsession our villains are the ones with the strongest dramatic need, and they’re usually willing to kill to get it, because there is nothing more important than the pursuit of love.

It’s the foundation of all emotion and it brings out both the best and worst in ourselves. And to be denied love over a long period of time can be an amazingly dangerous thing. If a person finds themselves in that kind of situation for years at a time…depraved of love, lonely, ostracized or neglected…with a want to do nothing more than to share this fundamental emotion…the feeling can become twisted, misguided, obsessive.

But there motivations will still be pure and based on a fundamental need that everyone on the planet has…  

The need to be loved.

So here is a list of characters that have inspired me since the moment I started watching movies, all men chasing love, and what love means to them, and they’re all pretty complicated guys.

• David “Noodles” Aaronson played by both Scott Tiler as a boy and Robert De Niro as an adult in Sergio Leone’s classic Once Upon A Time In America. The film, released in 1984, chronicles the lives of several Jewish ghetto youth rise to power in New York’s world of organized crime. The story spans from the 1920’s to the 1960’s but it’s not so much about crime as it is about friendship, love and betrayal.  The character of Noodles has so many complex highs and lows in the film it will make your head spin. And though his actions are down right despicable at times, both cold blooded murder and rape on two occasions, you manage to empathize with his plight and feel sorry for the horrible decisions he makes. Honorable mention to two other great sympathetic psychopaths that De Niro has played – Gil “Curly” Renard in The Fan and Rupert Pupkin in The King Of Comedy.
• Walter played by Kevin Bacon in The Woodsman. Released in 2004 and based on Steven Fechter’s play by the same name, The Woodsman tells the story of a convicted child molester who must adjust to life after prison.  Now I’m the kind of viewer that never judges the protagonist of a film. If the filmmaker wants me to sit down and go on a journey with a convicted child molester, I’m going to do it. And I’m going to allow that characters actions during the coarse of the film shape my opinion of them, but I won’t have any preconceived judgments going in. Regardless of what or who they are I’m down for the ride. And Kevin Bacons’ portrayal of Walter is both empathetic and fascinating. He’s not a bad man, he’s a good man who’s done atrocious things, and he’s trying desperately to control his dark impulses. And you root for him to succeed at being a man that can beat his demons. Kevin Bacon is no stranger to challenging roles and he shines in one of his earliest, Vic in White Water Summer.
• And on a lighter note, there’s John Candy’s portrayal of Del Griffith in John Hughes’s 1987 comedy Plane Trains and Automobiles. A movie I’ve watched every Thanksgiving since I was 12. Del’s character is one twist away from an obsessive lunatic and in the hands of say a director like John Carpenter instead of John Hughes, the film could have gone in a completely different way. But as in life, not all these characters deprived of love and in Del’s case also a home, turn down a dark path. Del is looking for a friend, just someone to talk to, and he’s a person full of love without a healthy outlet to distribute it. But the difference between Del and other characters like him as that he sees his faults and does his best to reconcile them… as he states toward the end of the film, “I am, with out a doubt, the biggest pain in the butt that ever came down the pike. I meet someone who’s company I really enjoy, and what do I do? I go overboard. I smother the poor soul.” Honorable mention for the comedic obsessed – Jim Carrey as Chip Douglas in The Cable Guy.

So in closing, just be careful who you invite into your life, the stranger in the grocery store checkout line looking to strike up a conversation may be looking for a friend, and once they find it, it may be really hard to let it go.