Feed

Since I’ve seen most of Brett Leonard’s filmography anyway (see Virtuosity) I decided to check out this one.  It’s about an Australian cop, Phillip Jackson (Patrick Thompson), that specializes in finding people doing illegal shit on the internet.  One day he comes across a website that seems kinda suspicious.  It’s a sex site that showcases women that are enormously obese, like bed bound obese.  What Jackson finds suspicious about this exactly I don’t know, but he’s got a hunch so he digs deeper and sees that the guy running this site has put up more than the usual amount of security or obstacles or whatever it is that blocks people from hacking into your computer.  Jackson eventually goes to Toledo, OH to try and nab the guy despite his superior officer telling him to let it go.  He becomes a man on a mission to find out what’s going on with this creepy website.

There’s a lot of crap that can (and will) turn people off that’s in this picture.  It’s shot fairly poorly, the editing is atrocious with the filmmakers wanting to make full use of all of Avid’s bells and whistles, the dialogue can be really bad at times even though there are some cool lines in here like the superior officer telling Jackson that he knew he should have sent him home when he found him crying in the toilet, and most of the acting is pretty bad too except for the villain. 

Alex O’Loughlin plays the bad guy, Michael Carter, and he’s good in this.  He’s a crazy sadistic motherfucker that looks like Bruce Payne in Passenger 57 minus the accent.  His plan is to keep feeding and feeding this woman and to get her as big as possible.  He follows her progress by measuring her dimensions, weighing her and monitoring other things like her blood pressure and heart rate.  But the thing is that this woman isn’t being held against her will.  In fact it’s the opposite, she actually wants to get fatter and is very happy when she reaches a milestone of weighing over 600 pounds.

This movie reminded me of Se7en a lot because of the torturous behavior that Carter inflicts upon this woman.  It’s almost like a whole movie of just the gluttony part.  But unlike Kevin Spacey where he sees what he’s doing as a burdened duty to society Carter is really into his work and pleased with the results.  There’s even a part in this movie where there’s what looks like a shell of a person on a bed that suddenly comes to life like the sloth victim in Se7en.  The religious overtones are amped way up in Feed though.

And this brings me to a theory that I have about this film.  I think the whole thing is a commentary on America.  Americans in this movie are portrayed as food loving obese Jesus freaks.  Now this isn’t a false observation really but I didn’t expect to find it in a B version of a Se7en-like thriller.  Every American that Jackson comes across is devoutly Christian and also unwilling to help him.  Carter’s wife knows about what her husband does but doesn’t really care, Carter’s former priest doesn’t want to be involved either, and the woman that Carter feeds and puts up on the internet doesn’t want Jackson to save her.  Jackson isn’t a perfect Australian but the ending shows that America and its ways have changed him for the worse.  By the way the ending was pretty cool and definitely not something that I saw coming. 

Feed was kinda hard to watch to be honest but it wasn’t the filmmaking that bothered me so much.  There’s something about seeing a person being fed and fed when they’re already so large that they’re immobile that got to me.  It made me wonder why both the feeder and the feedee would want to make someone’s fragile situation even worse, why someone would want to slowly kill him/herself in that way.  There was even a part in the beginning of this movie that was kinda nasty where Jackson busts into the home of a guy that wants pieces of his body cut off and fed back to him.  I guess this food thing is different than watching someone get blown away by a shotgun or stabbed with a knife because these people are just eating.  It’s something that we do every day and it made me feel a little icky inside that some people have these extreme eating habits.

So I think this will be the last Brett Leonard movie that I’ll be seeing for a long while.