½*/****
starring Barlow Jacobs, Robert Longstreet, Eddie Rouse
screenplay by Zack Godshall & Barlow Jacobs
directed by Zack Godshall
by Alex Jackson I absolutely despise Zack Godshall's Low and Behold. If there is a just and loving God governing the cosmos it will be the worst movie I see all year; there should be a provision in the Patriot Act ensuring that these people never receive the funding to make another film. Turner Stull (co-writer Barlow Jacobs) has arrived in post-Katrina New Orleans to take a job as an insurance claims adjuster that his crude Uncle "Stully" has set up for him. Turner is reluctantly learning the ropes when he meets factory worker Nixon (Eddie Rouse, the uncle in George Washington). Seeing that Turner needs help checking the roofs, Nixon offers to trade his services for a ride around town to look for his daughters' lost dog. Essentially, the film is a comedy–a really terrible one. Godshall scores lots of easy points against the uncle's crassness and avarice: Stully is giddy about the fact that he has so many claims to process post-Katrina, he sees it as a big payday. Nevertheless, Godshall strains to satirize the callousness of the claims adjustment industry, apparently believing them to be soulless because they don't visit people who haven't filed a claim and won't authorize payouts on houses with minimal damage. Obviously, if they could they would, as that would mean they would earn a higher commission–something Turner even points out for us. How could a film about Hurricane Katrina be this politically impotent? Turner's naïveté is the secondary source of laffs. There are several scenes where his salt-of-the-earth clients chew his head off and threaten him with physical violence for not paying out their claims, as well as a particularly bizarre monologue in which he explains to Nixon how he was afraid of going to the bathroom as a kid and mastered a technique of holding in his bowel movement for up to three days. I think Turner's experiences with Nixon are supposed to soften his hardened heart and force him to see his clients as human beings, yet the film views Turner as a babe-in-the-woods innocent. (On his first claim, he expresses feelings of remorse to his uncle for not paying out.) And so the character doesn't fulfill his intended arc, does he? At this point, Low and Behold would appear to be your run-of-the-mill piece of shit–but then Godshall sinks to a whole new low. He's shot the film on location in New Orleans and included interviews with actual disaster victims conducted by Jacobs in character. At the end of the picture, we see Nixon's dilapidated house, and there is an unbelievable and disgustingly manipulative twist ending. The last couple of shots have a primitive power, but Godshall has not earned a right to them. He seems to be using Katrina as a means to flesh out his vapid material. I hesitate to call Godshall opportunistic; Low and Behold is so awful that it can only be borne out of ignorance. The filmmakers must not understand that documentary footage of a recent disaster area goes together with lowbrow satire like salmon and chocolate.
