Review: If I Didn’t Care

You will not see another film this year made with so little ambition.

If I Didn’t Care
Photo: Artistic License Films

Let us praise If I Didn’t Care for living up to its title: You will not see another film this year made with so little ambition. The audacious press notes promise a “Hitchcockian film noir/thriller,” which is the same as praising You’ve Got Mail for being both “Altmanesque” and “funny.” How strange for a Hamptons-set story of infidelity and murder to exude scant insult or daring, but the gutlessness of If I Didn’t Care is such that it becomes impossible to interpret as a critique of persons who abuse their upper-class license or as an exaltation of privilege (filmmaker brothers Benjamin and Orson Cummings may live in the Hamptons, but they seem to have shot their story there only as a matter of budgetary convenience). In the film, Davis (Bill Sage) and his mistress, Hadley (Susan Misner), plot the murder of his wife, Janice (Noelle Beck), for reasons that are never exactly clear; how they stand to benefit from the woman’s murder is as vague as the nature of their affair is insufficiently dramatized. So incredulous is the whole thing that you’re not even convinced that Davis actually dislikes his wife, whose lowest moment is complaining that she can’t get anything to eat in their “provincial” neighborhood after a certain time—a perfectly reasonable gripe for anyone who hails from and works in New York City. Love or hate Adrian Lyne, the man is definitely an auteur, inviting us to be thrilled or repulsed by his tricked-up Chabrolian affairs. Since the point of view of these filmmakers is to have none at all, they deny us the same consideration, and as such If I Didn’t Care arrives in theaters already dead in the water.

Score: 
 Cast: Bill Sage, Roy Scheider, Susan Misner, Noelle Beck, Ronald Guttman, Alex Kilgore, Mirelly Taylor, Brian McQuillan  Director: Benjamin Cummings, Orson Cummings  Screenwriter: Benjamin Cummings, Orson Cummings  Distributor: Artistic License Films  Running Time: 80 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2006

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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