FILM REVIEW | Person of Interest, by Gregory Bayne

Take a few moments to recall the way you felt when you saw 1976′s classic Taxi Driver, a film about the slow ravages of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder/PTSD.

If you’re anything like most viewers, Robert DeNiro‘s deeply disturbing portrayal of demobilized Vietnam soldier Travis Bickle likely shook you to your core. Taxi Driver was avant-garde filmmaking at its best, in synch with its era and innovative in style. Audiences had never watched films like it before, as Hollywood boldly forged out into decidedly more experimental fare likely induced by the copious mounds of hallucinogenic drugs both studio executives and A-List directors were snorting, freebasing, and injecting to keep on top of the workload.

Yet Paul Schrader‘s script was a box office hit. Audiences were horrified by DeNiro’s portrayal as a menace to society and mortified by Bickle’s murderous urges and eventual exploits. But somehow people understood what was eating the man out from the inside. In the jungles of ‘nam, Bickle was nothing more than a sacrificial lamb, cannon fodder for an Administration hellbent on throwing its fighting forces into the soup as pawns in an asymmetrical battle the grunts were never going win. They were arrayed against a determined adversary who was relentless in a way the US Army had never experienced in any previous armed conflict.

Bickle suffered from PTSD, but experts hadn’t even coined the term yet. Lashing out at what he perceived to be decadent American society, Bickle was begging for a lifeline yet none was forthcoming and he took matters into his own hands. This was a new kind of anti-hero, 1970s-style.

Cut to today: I’d been lurking over at Sheri Candler‘s Facebook Fan Page and stumbled across Gregory Bayne‘s Person of Interest, an apparent homage to Taxi Driver.

This time it it’s Terrance Dyer (portrayed masterfully by J. Reuben Appelman) recently back from the Iraqi war, now living in Seattle. Like any other grunt back from conflict, the habits of military service die hard: Dyer pumps iron with a single-minded ferocity born of a man eagerly awaiting the next great war. He finds fault in every complacent corner of the luxury society Americans have acclimatized themselves to, going so far as to lecture anyone willing to listen as he preaches a kinder, nicer, version of the Gospel.

Dyer pounds the downtown Seattle pavement surrounded in a self-nurtured bubble of apathy, convinced, as he is, beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Feds who took him in for questioning following his dishonorable discharge are out to frame him.

Nola, a crusading citizen journo moonlighting as a dishwasher to make ends meet, is a regular attendee at Dyer’s nightly sturm und drang sermons and she’s smitten by his blowhard diatribes. She confronts him outside the community center where Terrance does his weekly thing, and off they go to get to know each other. Over the course of the evening, Nola summons up the courage to ask Terrance if it would be okay to interview him “for her blog, which scores 100,000 hits monthly,” as an example of a solider abandoned by his government and practically left to ruin.

Terrance, with an apprehension born of a man who spent far too many stretches under a searing Iraqi desert sun and in isolation up in Seattle, is reticent, but eventually capitulates. He holds out the possibility that Nola could still be a Federal stooge luring him ever-deeper into a Timothy McVeigh-style conspiracy.

Our narrative heats up as Nola’s interviews become increasingly invasive. Her investigative skills have unearthed Terrance’s military discharge dossier which reads like a tragedy. Sympathizing with how Dyer had been roundly abused by the US Army’s medical intake system as he returned Stateside, little does she know that all of this has fused poisonously in Dyer’s brain and is present in his every waking thought. So much so, in fact, that he’s become a danger not only to himself but to society at large. During a brief three-way encounter with Terrance’s paranoid brother Bear, wheelchair-bound after having his legs blown off in the war, Nola laughs off Bear’s sardonic suggestion that his brother Terrance might actually be mentally-deranged.

Still, all is not totally gloomy.

There are many things to admire about our protagonist. As a textbook anti-hero, Dyer isn’t entirely irredeemable. For instance, the pimping and whoring taking place on Seattle’s streets stokes his righteous indignation and he decides to make a cross-dressing nineteen year-old, Mark/Maggie, his so-called “greater than yourself” project. He warns this Maggie during their several encounters that s/he’s being humiliated by her/his pimp but doesn’t even realize it. Of course, Maggie’s living in denial, though it doesn’t stop her from dismissing Dyer’s anxieties as the ramblings of yet another ex-jarhead crackpot. Then there’s his budding relationship with Nola (played by newcomer Nova Tydings), which is suggestive of a potential romance. Somehow, though, Dyer is too self-absorbed and psychologically-addled to even consider any sort of intimate involvement.

During the course of the movie, we’re left wondering who exactly is manipulating who here? Is Nola muscling Terrance into a corner simply to cadge her scoop? Or is Terrance feeding Nola a daily pack of lies just to frame her right where he wants her?

While this non-linear (dare I say, “indie”) style of storytelling might not be everyone’s cup of joe, I personally enjoyed not being spoon-fed.

We also catch glimpses of Dyer bounding up a flophouse staircase to retrieve several manila envelopes from a handful of particularly shady-looking dudes, but we can’t discern what he’s really up to there. And then during his harrowing interrogation scenes with Federal Agent Stuts, we glean even more details about what might be transpiring over in the building, but nothing conclusive enough to help viewers connect the dots. For those accustomed to a more Agatha Christie-type of straight whodunnit, piecing together story fragments along the journey, Person of Interest might be stylistically off-putting, even though it was right up my alley. Again, a matter of personal taste.

And since we’re not about spoilers here at PMD-For-Hire, I’ll simply say this: whatever you thought Terrance, Nola, and the rest of the cast were up to all along, you’re about to be rudely surprised. For me it was totally worth the price of admission.

What I enjoyed most about Person of Interest?

As I’d told Gregory Bayne, I thought his casting selections were positively enlightened.

Slotting Person of Interest‘s screenwriter, J. Reuben Appleman into the lead role as Terrance Dyer was akin to cinematic genius, considering the fact that who better than the film’s writer would know how to best utter dialogue with the greatest amount of payload? Appleman totally went there, channeling Travis Bickle for most of the shoot, even buffing up to make the part look and sound convincing, shouldering Dyer’s angst-ridden apathy of the PTSD-afflicted leatherneck with gusto. You’ll think this guy’s the bee’s knees, even though you know you shouldn’t, almost like a guilty pleasure. It’s a feat few directors can pull off successfully.

I also admired the frisson of passion wafting between Nola and Terrance during their scenes. I was on tenterhooks during those moments, wanting Appleman to simply go with the energy of the moment and take Nola in repressed passion — yet it wasn’t to be. Fair? Perhaps not, yet it flowed nicely the scene and totally in keeping with Dyer’s overall inner kampf. While it would have been a novel departure from the familiar Taxi Driver tale, the director stuck to his guns.

Kudos also to Bayne — who worked the camera on this pic — for shot selection. Sound checked out, and so did picture.

Appleman also cleverly jammed in a pair of fine lines into the script, both of which had me giggling, but I’ll just hint what they were: one has to do with that large green and white logo-ed coffee conglomerate, the other a one-line punchline that I LoLed about thirty seconds after its telling. I suspect you will also.

Person of Interest is currently making its indie theatrical rounds, but if you go over to the URL you might be able to catch it in a theater near you soon.

If anything at all, this film will stir up a renaissance for the Scorsese classic and will spur discussion amongst audience members about the travesty of PTSD.

As Dyer himself astutely mentions in the film, it remains the number one leading injury of this current war.