Though an uneven effort, this flick is a dark, quirky gem-in-the-rough, not unlike the agates that don't look like much when you pick them up at Little Girl's Point, but turn out rather stunning after a week in the tumbler. In order to have ANY memory of this film after seeing it, one must skip the crappy extras on the DVD or the last remnant of good feeling toward the feature likely will be canceled out. The patronizing and absurdly repetitious cast & crew interviews last an endless 24 minutes, consisting of these people donning cheap Groucho masks (a gambit that's old in 24 seconds!) and asking each other the same sophomoric handful of questions over and over and over again. The only interesting tidbit to emerge here is that Lucky McKee wrote the first draft of the script in three days when he was a college student. "Alternate cast outtakes" is not much better. These 13 minutes are divided almost equally between two other actors (besides McKee) in the title role of Roman; they both suck. The earlier 2002 aborted effort with Kevin Ford is the more interesting (and, unfortunately, the second presented)--mostly because of background music and a nude chick, neither of which are present in the final 2006 version. It's best to just skip these miserable add-ons, in order to leave the mundane Pirandelloism of the feature's final frames unsullied in the mind's eye. Reinforcing the parting images is Kara and Boyd Jacobson's rendition of the haunting lost youth ditty "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard" over the closing credits, which strongly invites an allegorical interpretation of this whole effort. Like the ephemeral playmates in this bittersweet tune, is it not possible that both "Isis" and Eva are figments of Roman's imagination; competing dream girls on par with Roman's two-minute fantasy about a flowery Earth mother and the alternate FLASHDANCE-styled welder that sets the tone for the movie six minutes in? Throughout the film, Roman is totally inarticulate with his coworkers, his landlord, and his neighbors. Yet he is philosophically verbose with the two ladies. Perhaps he is so taciturn with real people because his interior dialogs drown them out. No doubt the inspiration for this script was the Nineteenth Century Georg Buchner play WOYZECK, which I had to read at the same age McKee was when he wrote this script. An army doctor forces Mr. Woyzeck onto an all-pea diet, which soon causes him to flip out and kill his wife. In McKee's movie, a girl (real or not) entices Roman onto an all-pork & beans diet (cases of the stuff are the main furnishing of his efficiency), with similar murderous results (real or not). Maybe it's time to check on the safety of Morgan Spurlock's significant other, given his all-McDonald's diet?
Review of Roman
