Gus Van Sant’s “Restless” is going to take everyone by surprise next year. It’s also going to be a nice change of pace and hopefully a very unique work in his oeuvre. Produced by Ron Howard, Bryce Dallas Howard and Brian Grazer, the script, written by newcomer Jason Lew is unlike any work the director has ever tackled and is something that was brought to his doorsteps. In fact, Lew went to film school with Dallas Howard. She brought the script to Imagine where it’s set up under a deal with Columbia Pictures and they took it to Van Sant.
Clearly the producers here felt like the Portland filmmaker would be a good fit for the material, but it is a bit of an odd choice and not an immediate no-brainer for him.
Meaning: when you’ve finished reading the peculiar and wistful screenplay, that’s comedic, dramatic and melancholic in tone, the first director that comes to mind to direct is not Gus Van Sant. However, that’s precisely why this could be his most interesting film in years and certainly different from anything we’ve ever seen him tackle. Then again, with films like “Elephant,” “Paranoid Park,” he has evinced a strong ear for the teenage experience. Still, this is very contradistinct.
“Restless” is many things, and it’s hard to define and peg. Budgeted at a modest $15 million, the picture features a “Terms Of Endearment”-like love story with a cancer twist, that’s part “Romeo & Juliet” part dark comedy ala, “Harold & Maude” (the couple — one of them being lead actress Mia Wasikowska — in the film crash funerals) and part emo-teen romance (“Twilight”-ish we suppose as there are moribund, goth-ish tendencies, but actually it’s very cleverly written, with a ton of humor and not at all annoying). Yes, the teenagers have their angst, but trust us, we’re the first to be put-off by this tone if it doesn’t ring true.
It also features a ghost story — a Japanese Kamikaze pilot who haunts, more like befriends the main protagonist, Enoch Brae. Brae is not casted yet, but he plays the love interest to Waskikowska. Since the pilot seems to be young in the script — a young 19-year-0ld solider possibly — coming to mind for the part for us is “Disturbia” actor Aaron Yoo, who was actually hyper obnoxious in that film, but this role is very staid, so he could work).
Movieline wrote a fairly dismissive (or jokey) review of the script, but from the sounds of it, they only skimmed the beginning to reveal the plotline. The script is certainly different from anything we’ve read in a long time and does an extraordinary job of mixing dramatic, comedic and just strange tones all together (see the ghost story which is initially elusive and not fully explained — you sort of think it’s just an odd friend). It’s really nowhere as “emo” or black-lipsticky as some have suggested and if it was painful tween emo, we would have probably slit our wrists before we would have finished it. The picture is warm, truthful and pretty emotionally reeling near the end.
There’s a reason why Gus Van Sant signed on to this material. It’s not your average teen love story at all, and it has a wonderful mood and atmosphere that could see the director bringing some of the incredibly “Paranoid Park” and “Lost Days” visuals to the picture. This is not GVS slumming for “Twilight” ala Chris Weitz or Catherine Hardwicke admirably trying to make chicken soup out of chicken shit. Most anticipated 2010? At the very least it’ll be an interesting experiment and hell, we love it when a director leaves his comfort zone to try something very new and that is very much the case here with “Restless.”