The Paperboy

The Paperboy

Possibly the most underrated film of the 2010s

The Paperboy movie poster

The Paperboy premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in in May of 2012, where it was widely panned. It suffered such critical contempt that it never got more than a limited release in the U.S., and to this day it has only a 44% critic and 33% audience rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

All those reviewers are wrong.

The film had it's admirers - and not insignificant ones either. The Guardian, and Roger Ebert to name a couple. But they were few and far between. Yet only a year later, UK paper The Daily Telegraph did a complete 180 when it re-reviewed the film upon its general release a year later. It was also nominated for a boatload of awards the year after it's festival premiere. What accounts for this?

We can only speculate. What we do know is that between 2012 and 2013 streaming services (Netflix in particular) began to seriously cut into Hollywood's bottom line resulting in an almost complete emphasis on tentpole special effects films in 2013. Overnight the smaller, stranger dramas like The Paperboy became a rarity - that alone may have warranted the reappraisal.

But the initial ire was likely because of just how sleazy a film The Paperboy is in comparison to both mainstream Hollywood, and the Indie Arthouse world. From at least the late 60s to the mid 90s this was familiar territory for film - from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls to Se7en, there were films exploring the sleazy underbelly of America. But sometime around the turn of the millennium movies became so sanitized that a film like The Paperboy landed like a bomb. And bomb it did, making back only about 10% of it's already modest budget.

But what it delivers is worth checking out - a hot mess of a film set in the corrupt courtrooms, backwater bayous, dim motel rooms, and bright sand beaches of Florida that follows a trio of small town newspapermen, and a prison groupie looking into the suspicious conviction of a lowlife swamp-dweller for the murder of a dictatorial good-ole-boy sheriff, and the predictable downward spiral their lives take once they meet. Think of The Big Easy crossed with Blue Velvet, and you get some idea of what you're in for.

The Good: 

• Nicole Kidman deserves an Oscar for this one

The Bad:

• The mystery takes a back seat to just about everything else in the film

Stuff to watch for:

• vintage cars and soundtrack

Pairing: double rum daiquiris

The Verdict:
***1/2 out of *****