Careless 3 stars
Colin Hanks, Tony Shalhoub, Rachel Blanchard
Directed by Peter Spears
Shows again June 11 at 5:30 p.m.
Wiley (Hanks) is your average neurotic guy with a boring life, until one night he steps on something on the kitchen floor. It’s a finger, and it’s not one of his. Thus begins his half-cocked, amateur sleuthing adventure, filled with an assortment of oddball characters. But it’s when Wiley meets Cheryl (Blanchard) that the plot thickens. This beauty might just be the woman he’s been looking for—and not merely because she has nine fingers.
The love story quickly takes a back seat to Wiley’s growing obsession with the detached digit. The investigation leads him to increasingly strange situations, but the accompanying quirky humor is a mixed bag, since some of the gags are a little too weird for their own good. One scene has a man throwing eggs down at Wiley from a fourth-story window. Oddly, all the eggs smash harmlessly beside Wiley, who continues his conversation as though nothing were happening. That’s funny. But another scene has police interrogating Wiley, and when he tells them that he lost the finger, the reaction of one of the officers is so bizarre, we don’t laugh because we’re too busy wondering what the hell this guy is even doing.
The answers we eventually get to the mystery are as offbeat and random as anything else in the film, but they lack that extra punch. When your movie begins with someone stepping on a severed finger while washing dishes, the surprise at the end needs to top that. And the tone of the resolution, with its philosophical voice-over and relationship ponderings, only highlights the film’s romance-department shortcomings, especially since Wiley never demonstrates that he’s more interested in the girl than the mystery.
In the Q&A after the screening, director Spears mentioned that the original ending featured a reveal of yet another inexplicably amputated appendage under Wiley’s bed. That ending would’ve been more effective and truer to the subversive nature of the story. The more we concentrate on the quirkiness, the less we notice how thin the rest of the material is.