Philadelphia Weekly

Every so often a filmmaker will have two films released in the same year. Upcoming weeks will bring Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood's second 2008 film after the October-released Changeling. Meanwhile Gus Van Sant's depressingly paint-by-numbers biopic Milk arrives only half a year after his exquisitely arty Paranoid Park.

Shy of Baz Luhrmann unexpectedly producing a follow-up to Australia in the next couple months, I can't think of a filmmaker less welcome to release multiple films in a short time span than Randall Miller.

Who, you ask?

Exactly.

Miller's wildly uninvolving California wine saga Bottle Shock was released in August. This flick used its Sideways-ish subject and all-star (or at least moderate-star) cast to gain a couple bucks, then quickly disappear from screens. Surely such an uninspiring artistic temperament doesn't need to crop up more than once every three or four years.

But unfortunately Miller had another thumb-twiddler sitting on the shelf. Called Nobel Son and as self-pleased as its title, it's a darkly comic farce on the order of the Coens' overhated Burn After Reading--a bloody, twisty-turny satire on a very American brand of greed, egocentrism and excess. This year didn't need another one of these films, much less one as banal as the rest of Miller's output.

At the center of the shenanigans is Barkley Michaelson (Bryan Greenberg, Prime), the dirt-poor son of Eli Michaelson (Alan Rickman), a chemistry professor so vile he's introduced pounding away on one of his failing female students. Soon thereafter Eli learns he's won the Nobel Prize. This is supposed to be humorous.

Even before the unhappy family, rounded out by matriarch Sarah (Mary Steenburgen), can jet to Sweden to collect the award, Barkley gets whacked on the head by a bat. Upon waking, he discovers he's been kidnapped by a man of mystery (Shawn Hatosy), who claims Eli stole the theory for which he was feted from his deceased father. Thing is, Eli doesn't seem to believe, or particularly care, that his son is being held for ransom.

Nobel Son has plenty more hairpin turns en route to the end. I won't reveal them, partly out of journalistic ethics, partly because I can barely remember them only a handful of hours after experiencing them. Miller, who co-wrote and directed, opens the film with Barkley brooding on voiceover about how good and evil are no longer absolutes, how he identifies with Scarface, yadda yadda. But this darkly ruminative beginning turns out to be just as misleading as some of the plot's red herrings. Ultimately, Nobel Son is more interested in a fashionable cynicism that's not remotely genuine.

Given that Miller's output consists of light, bland crowdpleasers (he also made Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing & Charm School), Nobel Son is a fine example of what happens when nice directors try to go bad--as when Nora Ephron tried to enter the age of Tarantino with the woeful Lucky Numbers. Like that film, Nobel Son sometimes goes too far--the opening depicts some poor guy getting a thumb severed in graphic close-up. But generally speaking it remains callow and cowardly.

Still, this would all be at least fairly tolerable if it weren't so aggressively overdirected. Miller can't keep his camera still, making lateral pans and whips and pointlessly speeding the action up for a couple seconds � la Zack Snyder--all under a persistent techno score that sounds left over from the Ocean's 11 movies. I could go on, but I'd rather just forget this thing and its maker. Luckily, that should be pretty easy.