The Jesus Rolls (2019)
(On Cable TV, July 2020) There’s a lot to explain if we’re going to tackle The Jesus Roll. We can talk about how this is John Turturro’s return behind the camera. We can say it’s a remake of a 1974 French film. Or we can say that it’s also a The Big Lebowski spinoff focusing on a minor character. Of those things, let’s make it clear that the link between the classic 1998 Coen Brothers film and this one is one of marketing more than theme or character, because once you’re past a few surface characteristics, what we have here is a flat and perplexing crime comedy. Turturro hams it up as a lustful Latin Jewish character, but makes the mistake of believing that an acclaimed supporting character is tolerable as the lead. The Jesus Rolls does have a few highlights—mostly in the cast, which (briefly) includes such notables as Christopher Walen, Audrey Tautou, Jon Hamm, Susan Sarandon and others. There’s also a strange unpredictability in the way the film becomes a road movie, then a sex comedy (ish) with libidinous characters (ah, there’s the French influence) then ends on a whim with no real conclusion. (Or rather—it keeps going for a minute after what would have been a conclusion, just long enough to reassure us that the characters lived.) It all makes for a mess of a film—and one that’s not funny, not fun and not interesting. The comedy is sparse and pointless—while writer-director Turturro seems to be having a blast, it’s in service of a piece so personal that it might as well be rebarbative. The contrast with The Big Lebowski couldn’t be clearer.