Review: Kill the Poor

Kill the Poor is a prime example of a failed adaptation. Not that I've read Joel Rose's novel, which is currently out of print, but I have read what the film's director, Alan Taylor, has to say about the book, and none of his words could be used to describe the version that he delivers on screen.

First of all, he calls the book "hilarious". The film doesn't even seem intent on being so. He then goes on to label it "tragic" and "a whirlwind", neither of which applies to his film, which has no emotional ground whatsoever. The characters are undeveloped, their story is boring, and the plotting is a mess. Surely these elements are handled well in the novel and surely there are other assets within its pages, but there is really no evidence of its merits here. Based on the film, I was uncertain as to what about the book was worth Taylor's "yearning to adapt it.".

With no luck in finding an actual copy of the book, I had only the reviews on Amazon and the NYU library to go by. It appears that Taylor isn't the only fan. It also appears the book is much grittier and more provocative. Despite disliking the movie, I'm a little interested in locating and reading the novel.

Here is my gathering of the synopsis of the book: A former junkie named Joe moves back to the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York once inhabited by his immigrant grandparents – and once the setting of his days shooting heroin – and has to deal with other addicts and a bullying squatter. I imagine it's an intimate portrayal of Alphabet City with a conscious reflection of the city's environmental and social changes. I could be wrong, but I can't think of it as being anything short of a masterpiece. Not with Taylor's gushings.

The synopsis of the movie is ostensibly the same except that Joe (David Krumholtz) is not an ex-junkie; he's just a regular guy who thinks it would be neat to live in his family's old neighborhood, especially since it is all he can afford. He buys into a co-op with his wife (Clara Bellar), a French stripper who married him for a green card. But they have a kid together. And for a marriage of convenience, they seem more in love than most couples. Whatever – the definition of their relationship is an incidental part of the film anyway.

All that you really need to know about the characters is that some are male and some are female and they all share this crummy tenement on Avenue E. If you insist on knowing more, I'll only add that one is gay and one is an artist and another is a grad student and another is a floozy. If you require anything beyond that, you're out of luck. I think each of them has a name too, but I don't know why. They aren't people; they're just roles, and the credits could list them by name or by their singular trait. It doesn't matter.

Considering they have no personalities, no backgrounds and no real desires, the near lack of story is fitting and the complete absence of drama is a given. These less-than-one-dimensional creatures are like a sitcom cast without the situation or the comedy. There is a simple hullabaloo about the bullying squatter (Paul Calderon), whom the co-op members want to either pay rent or move out, though they never do more than sit around and whine about the problem. I never really understood why any of them should care, though, since none of them seemed to have jobs. Nor did I believe that any of them could afford the 15 grand to own a share of the building, except Joe, who got his by marrying the wife, who probably could have had him for free.

In what seems an attempt to disguise the insufficiency of actual storytelling, the plot of the film bounces around within a time-span of about three years or so in the early 1980s. It may be one of the least-appropriately nonlinear movies ever made, and the only chance there is to figure out when each scene takes place is to notice if Joe's wife is pregnant or holding their baby. In addition to this tortured and torturous editing, there are occasionally scenes that begin with captions, giving an apartment number and a name, as if the film could actually provide tenant-centered vignettes without actually fleshing out the tenants.  All it does is maybe let us draw up a mental diagram of the building and also have another incidental thing with which to attribute to each character.

As a look at the East Village squats of 20 years ago, the film has as much relevance to 2006 (or to 2003, when it was made) as the recent Rent movie, but without the soundtrack and the fanbase. And at least that film looked good. You'd be better off looking at a bootleg copy of Rent than the dark, grainy, digital cinematography found in Kill the Poor.

Kill the Poor was a decade-long labor of love for Taylor, who also directed the films Palookaville and The Emperor's New Clothes and currently seems to making the rounds filming episodes for the hottest television shows on the air. At one time he was co-writing the script with Rose, until it appeared the author was too close to the source to adapt it effectively. He eventually fired himself as screenwriter, too, and brought on Daniel Handler, best known as his alter-ego, Lemony Snicket, writer of the children's book  "A Series of Unfortunate Events", which also suffered a disappointing trip to the big screen.

My guess is that Taylor was too close to the book, as well, and he may serve as a good argument for filmmakers not to adapt materials they are too enamored of or so familiar with. In the case of Kill the Poor, perchance Taylor was not able to objectively look at his version and see how little it works on its own. He isn't the first director to inadequately account for the inconversant audience.

Adaptations work best when the translation is fresh and liberal, transforming and not merely transplanting the story from one medium to another. It would appear that Taylor was not completely literal or faithful to Rose's novel, but it does seem that his hopes for a relocation of reverence were too high and unachievable.