"It's not real life. Look at you, you have a stuffed toy alligator under your arm."
For an 89-minute film based around a one-joke premise, Rubber proves surprisingly hard to pin down. On one hand, it proves the most riotous example of an openly meaningless film since the Coen brothers made their After Hours with Burn After Reading. On the other, director Quentin Dupieux's transparent overexertion to make Rubber into a cult film subtracts from its loopy charm, and for all the clever jokes that arise from its meta-humor, I wish he'd played it straighter.But the tangled web of ironic filmmaking makes figuring out what I think of a movie as difficult as sussing out its intended and unintended dips in quality, so maybe it's fitting that the best scene of the film is also a summary of what's wrong with it. Opening on static shots of chairs bizarrely arranged on a remote desert road, Rubber gets underway with outright fourth-wall breaking as a car drives over every chair on the road, stops and pops open its trunk to reveal a sheriff who promptly gets a glass of water. He begins asking rhetorical questions to the camera, such as "In Spielberg's E.T., why is the alien brown? No reason." Eventually, examples of reasonless moments in cinema have clear reasons indeed ("Why does the president get shot" in JFK?). He gives the audience a vital, if self-absolving, key to this movie, calling it an "homage to 'no reason,' that most powerful element of style." You've been warned.
