Bug

Creepy Crawly Conspiracies


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By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
Published: May 24, 2007


There was a time when Ashley Judd seemed poised to take on if not great roles, then at least interesting ones. Her 1993 breakthrough in the delicate drama "Ruby in Paradise" suggested that she could go far in films that called for vulnerable young women with steely underpinnings. Instead she strayed into mediocre thrillers ("Kiss the Girls," "High Crimes") that not even Morgan Freeman's dignified presence could salvage.



In "Bug," an overwrought psychodrama directed by William Friedkin, Ms. Judd's acting continues to surpass her career choices. Playing a vaguely unstable barmaid living in a seedy Oklahoma motel, she convincingly juggles an abusive husband (a bulked-up Harry Connick Jr.) and a newfound lover (Michael Shannon), who sees creepy-crawlies in the mattress and conspiracies everywhere.



Adapted by Tracy Letts from his 2004 play, "Bug" builds momentum from Michael Grady's agitated camera movements and Ms. Judd's increasingly distressed face. Mr. Friedkin has always been more fascinated by the evil inside our heads than the boogeyman outside, and he knows how to turn small spaces — like the bedroom in "The Exorcist" — into horrific theaters of war.



The escalating hysteria and grisly set pieces of "Bug" may strain credulity, but Ms. Judd has never been more believable as a woman condemned to attract the wrong kind of man.


"Bug" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Its characters lose clothes, teeth and eventually their minds.

It is almost a requirement to see Bug with an open mind, without even knowing what it's about. It's easier to then effectively plunge into this story of gradual madness, timid mistrust to beginning doubts before being carried into a crescendo as surreal as it is alarming, with an apocalyptic finale. William Friedkin delivers a major work here, not refusing self-citation (an incredible scene where Peter goes into a sort of epileptic fit that makes Linda Blair look like a ballerina, throwing his ruined body onto the bed). Bug is a film which, under his stylistic as well as narrative control, marks the great return of the one of the masters of American cinema.

The world is going badly. With this troubling and funny adaptation of a play by Tracy Letts (who also wrote the script), the author of The Exorcist and French Connection delivers a black vision of a world suffering from a paranoia generated by terrorist threats, wars and all kinds of other secret manipulations: mystical, political, economic.

Agnes (Ashley Judd), a waitress living in fear of her husband's release (played by Harry Connick, Jr.) from prison, bathes in the sordid loneliness of her motel room lost in the desert. While she waits on Peter, a strange vagrant who speaks in enigmas, she believes she's found company to fill an existential vacuum. Except here we have an invasion of insects (that they alone can see) and the young man's insane conspiracy theories involve her little by little into the most radical madness.

From the beginning, Friedkin instills an anxiety that doesn't let go of the audience until the trauma of the final scenes. The exponential uneasiness contained in the film is balanced with a deliciously incongruous humor. Aerial shot of a lost road in the night with the noise of a helicopter in the distance. The camera slowly approaches the motel lights, a decoration of the almost totally claustrophobic atmosphere of the film. Even before the arrival of the so-called insects, which is the trigger that sets off the actors' madness, underlying anguish reigns in the details of the setting: from the décor to the soundtrack and the physical acting of the main characters. Close-ups on a telephone which does not stop ringing until the receiver is picked up, on the humming air-conditioning, on the ventilator of the ceiling light, ready to decapitate...as many elements which allow one to think that this motel room will soon be the theatre of a terrible drama which will stay with the audience long after the credits roll.

The success of this unclassifiable film also holds in the incredible work of the actors, with Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon at the head. Shannon manages to confer an apparent innocence to his character, and to impose a progressive transformation on his body, his self-mutilations (scarring and pulling out a tooth without anesthetic) frightening in their suddenness and their violence. The actress gives herself the luxury of flirting with theatrics in the last twenty minutes. This by no means harms the work, since these excesses of acting intervene when their madness reaches its climax, when nothing seems real, when reason has definitely left their minds: the minds of protagonists, recluses in their cocoon of crazy love, even that of the audience, taken by the throat by tension pushed to the extreme, the surreal backdrop, the delirious dialogue and the violence of the final scenes.

Bug can't leave anyone indifferent. Through its stylistic excess and the radical nature of its subject matter, it is placed among the most successful of Friedkin's films.

Moland Fengkov
Translated into English by Anji Milanovic

By Carina Chocano, Times Staff Writer

One of those shifty words that happens to describe a range of unrelated yet somehow mysteriously connected ideas, "bug" — which can of course refer to a variety of insects as well as function as a synonym for things such as "to bother," "to put under surveillance" and "to totally freak out" — seems to span the range of delusional paranoid concerns like somebody planned it.

William Friedkin's "Bug" is an adaptation of Tracy Letts' play about a pair of lonely losers who hole up in an Oklahoma motel room together to crack up and fall apart. The play had successful runs in Chicago, New York and London, and coincidentally (or maybe not) is also running at the Coast Playhouse in West Hollywood through June 3. The film version, starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon (he also appeared in the original productions), is creepy and unsettling, to say nothing of gory, but overall it's a little claustrophobic and uneven.

The movie opens with an aerial shot of the motel, a middle-of-nowhere dump we've come to recognize as the kind of place where no good can come to anyone. And I'm not talking about bad cable reception or a broken ice machine. Something about the washed-out, yellowy beige landscape and the nervously undulating light suggests imminent bloodshed, and on this front "Bug" delivers, if in relatively small doses.

It takes some time to settle into the notion that Agnes, or Aggie (Judd), actually lives in the place, so unsettled is her demeanor and so impersonal her personal space. Aggie's nervousness, we learn, is due to the recent release of her felonious ex-husband, Jerry (Harry Connick Jr.), who may be the person taunting her with all the silent phone calls she's been receiving. As for her interior design sense, though, it's suggested she's lived here for a while and she has apparently never unpacked more than a bottle of booze and a cigarette.

It only takes looking at Aggie to know that she's in for it, and the impression is confirmed when her best friend, R.C. (Lynn Collins), who is a lesbian, comes over with a guy for Aggie and some drugs for the three of them one night.

Shifty and quiet, tense and vulnerable, Peter looks and acts like the kind of guy horror movies were built on. Among the first things he says to our heroine is: "I'm not an ax murderer." Among the second: "I make people nervous anyway."

He's not kidding.

Peter, it turns out, has a complicated psychological past further complicated by the U.S. Army, from which he's gone AWOL. Opening up to Aggie about his past and his fears, he sounds — not that we're trained experts — like your basic delusional schizophrenic. Then again, it might just be impossible not to sound like a delusional schizophrenic when describing certain top-secret Army protocols. I wouldn't know.

To complicate matters further, Peter isn't exactly the type to just say no, either — though the drugs that show up near the beginning of the film don't make another appearance until near the end.

Not having seen the theatrical production, it's not possible for me to say how much better this concept worked onstage, but my guess is that "Bug" may be fundamentally better suited to the other medium. The problem is not the single-room set or the nonspecific depressive naturalist look of the production, or even the occasionally abstracted, cadenced language — though none of these choices really quite supports what turns out to be a metaphysical freak-out inspired by a play on words.

The main problem for me was the fallback naturalism of the style, which made what must read on stage as ambiguity read on film as inconsistency. Aggie's point of view — which, after all, as she hungrily adopts her new boyfriend's madness in order to stave off any more loneliness, is our entry into a purely imagined world — is kept at a distance. Close-ups of Peter's mysterious bloodsucking aphids — whether they exist or no — are notably missing. It's one thing to take Aggie's word for it that she does, in fact, see the bugs Peter so fervently believes in while she's yards away on a stage; it's another to do so when the camera could so easily give her eyeball-an-inch-away-from-his-finger- eye-view but chooses not to.

It comes as a surprise, as the movie advances, to realize that what we're watching, gruesome as it becomes, is also a parody, and a very funny one at that. The shift in tone — reflected in the ever more panicky language, the anti-insect redecoration of the room and the gruesomeness of the violence — takes us from what begins as a grim, familiar drama into something much weirder. By the end, you wonder if you're not hallucinating too.

There's a clever and interesting conceit somewhere in here, and the creepiness of it gets under your skin. But "Bug's" relentless unpleasantness, which Friedkin bogs us down in instead of crystallizing it into what might have been a stylish head trip, can get to be a chore.

carina.chocano@latimes.com

"Bug." MPAA rating: R for some strong violence, sexuality, nudity, language and drug use. Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes. In general release.

By Wesley Morris


Boston Globe
Published: 05/25/2005

The love in "Bug" should not be tried at home. It shouldn't be tried anywhere, really, unless you happen to be one of the trained professionals involved in William Friedkin's engrossingly manic version of Tracy Letts's great stage play. And even then, I'd opt for something less flammable.
It's an oddball romantic drama that descends into comic horror and delivers Ashley Judd at full neurotic tilt (a new angle for her). Lionsgate , which brought us the "Saw" series and "Hostel," is the distributor. Despite the stabbings, amateur dentistry, and worse (yes, worse), "Bug" might throw the average horror fan for a loop with its patient escalation and long conversations. Still it's a surprising, intelligent addition to the studio's sadomasochistic collection.

Judd plays Agnes , a sweaty, coke-snorting woman cooped up in an Oklahoma motel room, where most of the movie is set. Agnes has a problem with her phone. It won't stop ringing. But whoever's at the other end doesn't say anything. She assumes it's her abusive jailbird ex. One drug-fueled evening, Agnes's lesbian friend R.C. (Lynn Collins ) deposits a stranger at Agnes's dingy hovel. He's a tall, wide-faced creature named Peter (Michael Shannon ).

At first, Peter doesn't say a whole lot. He's simply imposing in a way that's sweet and the littlest bit scary. This is, in part, because Peter -- especially when he holds a lamp too close to his face -- looks a lot like young Christopher Walken . It's a resemblance that promises the bizarre. And Peter doesn't disappoint, explaining his uncanny ability to make people nervous: "I pick up things unapparent."

He picks up the sound of a cricket chirping in Agnes's room, for starters. Then he picks up Agnes's willingness to hear it, too.

Were the chirps just her smoke alarm? It barely matters. Suffering a void in her life, she's open to hearing and seeing whatever else he might think he hears and sees. This includes the aphid he swears has bitten him after they make love. Friedkin films the sex like something out of a nature special, with nipples, legs, smalls of the back, and other areas ambiguously arched and spread. In case we've missed the connection, he's redundantly thrown in a scare-shot of an insect at the end of his steamy montage.

That bite in her bed turns into an obsessive search for more bugs, then more bites, both of which Agnes says she sees. Does she see them because they're really there? Does she see them because she's high? Does she see them because she's empathizing with the increasingly unhinged Peter, who basically moves in?

Once she starts peering through his little microscope and hearing his tales of conspiratorial medical-military experimentation, it's too late. Her apartment becomes decorated in nasty flytraps and electric zappers and fogged with bug spray.

If little about Agnes and Peter's perception seems real, their paranoid attraction totally is, and the experience of watching this man burrow deep under this woman's skin (physically and psychologically) is what gives "Bug" its delirious kick. The scratching, the manipulation, the queasy self-mutilation: Not since Michael Haneke's "The Piano Teacher" has the line between besotted and nuts been so hard to glean.

Letts , who adapted "Bug" himself, has what can best be called a sick sense of humor and compelling way with the darker recesses of human nature. His writing here allows the plausible and the absurd to seem so indistinguishable that it doesn't matter which is which.

The movie works as a byproduct of our current climate of suspicious secrecy and wartime post - traumatic stress. But it's probably better appreciated as a work about intense infatuation where desperate feelings are dragged out into the theatrical open. In the last 20 minutes, production designer Franco-Giacomo Carbone even transforms Agnes's motel room into an exaggerated outgrowth of the characters' recreational obsessions. The place is covered in so much foil and colored with such frying neon light that it looks like a bug zapper for freebasers.

Some of Friedkin's attempts to break the movie out its single setting (that sex montage, needless aerial shots of a helicopter's approach toward the motel) are crude. Letts's writing doesn't lend itself to that kind of visual explication: the symbols speak for themselves. Still, it's been over 20 years since the director's filmmaking has been this convincing. Like "The Exorcist ," which Friedkin made in 1973 at the top of his commercial powers, "Bug" is another viscerally draining tale of possession.

And directing the possessed, Friedkin is in his element. This cast is small, and it's very good, including Harry Connick Jr. as Agnes's greasy husband and Brian F. O'Byrne , who briefly adds further mystery to the proceedings.

Shannon and Judd luxuriate in codependent frenzy. He had a small but memorable part as a scarily patriotic marine in "World Trade Center ," and originated the role of Peter on the New York stage. He finds a core of sadness within Peter's mania, making the character just vulnerable enough for us to get why Agnes would want to abet his madness.

Meanwhile, Judd does wounded, needy, frazzled, grimy, and stupid with a crackle her acting has lacked. For once, it's her emotional nakedness that's exciting. Having bared so much of her body, she finally seems eager to bare some of her soul.

She and Shannon seem to know they're playing something simultaneously ridiculous and emotionally for-real. "Bug" is funny and thrilling. The comedy and horror are boiled together, and the fatalistic result might be tragedy, sure. But it's a gonzo kind you can laugh at.