Problems with your "Mail Order Wife"? Seek revenge!
I'm not quite sure what to make of "Mail Order Wife," the new American ultra-indie effort from the writing and directing team of Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland. Well, OK, I have thoughts, I just don't know what they add up to. In no particular order, here are 10 of them:

1) These guys get full credit for making a mockumentary (about a sad-sack New York doorman who orders a bride from Burma, with disastrous results) and not trying to trick anybody with an earnest-sounding Web site or misleading press coverage or some bogus "guerrilla marketing" campaign. Inevitably some people will see it and think it's a real documentary, and that'll be funny and weird, but the movie's probably darker and funnier if you get what's going on from the outset. Last year I dutifully covered Zak Penn's "Incident at Loch Ness," a mediocre film that was totally overwhelmed by the prodigious hoax that surrounded it. "Mail Order Wife" stands on its own.

2) The story told in "Mail Order Wife" isn't remotely plausible, and Botko and Gurland have plowed fearlessly deep into territory that some will see as racism and misogyny. I've got the feeling I should furrow my brow and be concerned, but the movie is also well acted, profoundly unhinged and very funny, so who cares? Besides, as art-film god Peter Greenaway once infamously observed, you can't be called a misogynist if you hate everybody equally.

3) You just don't see American comedies that are this ruthless. That either means that Botko and Gurland have just punched themselves a one-way ticket back to Dubuque or they're going to be the next big thing, and will shortly be signed to direct "Dodgeball 3" or a musical based on the Monica Lewinsky scandal (Christina Ricci, anyone?) or something. I have no idea which.

4) What I mean by "ruthless" is that the characters gradually and subtly escalate to ever more finely calibrated grades of obnoxiousness. Doorman Adrian (Adrian Martinez) is an obese Queens slob who basically wants a domestic slave instead of a wife, and has no hope of getting laid except out of a catalog. His imported bride Lichi (Eugenia Yuan) seems at first like a stereotypically shy and submissive Asian woman, the perfect target for Adrian's victimization, but turns out to have unexpected depths of duplicity and vindictiveness. But those two are only minor assholes, as it turns out.

5) Here's one of the great, if obvious, principles of comedy: Make fun of yourself and you can get away with almost anything. Adrian and Lichi's marriage is funded by a documentary filmmaker named Andrew Gurland (played by, um, Andrew Gurland). Andrew is supposed to be our guide through the sociological train wreck of this arranged marriage, but he turns out to be a self-involved, pretentious and supercilious prick beyond anything hapless Adrian or faux-helpless Lichi could imagine. I shouldn't give anything more away, but when Andrew rides into the marriage like a noble white knight, seeking to rescue Lichi from Adrian's sadistic porn fantasies, the movie goes completely apeshit.

6) At the same time, there's some real subtlety to "Mail Order Wife." As an understated satire of the painful sincerity of documentary filmmaking, especially of the confessional, participant-observer type, it's actually brilliant.

7) Acting in low-budget indies is almost never this good. Martinez captures the density of Adrian in a way that's real and not condescending. You can't quite hate the shlub, despite what he does to Lichi. He's a dumbass, fueled by primitive instincts -- but hey, he's not as big a creep as Andrew is!

8) Then there's Eugenia Yuan, an Asian-American actress given the impossible task of playing a fresh-off-the-jet arrival who speaks no English and appears, at first, to be a Suzy Wong caricature. There's no way Lichi should be a believable character, but she kind of is. Maybe the performance of the year to date.

9) Then there's the former baseball star who's been in the news a lot lately. Exactly how he wound up playing himself in this movie I don't know. Some bizarre cosmic serendipity was at work, though. And he's pretty good!

10) Basically "Mail Order Wife" is completely deranged, and the portrait it paints of our beloved country depicts a dangerous place full of neurotics and obsessives. But lots of fun, with porn, booze, backyard barbecues and elaborate revenge schemes! It all rings strangely true, folks, and while Botko and Gurland may be cynical human beings doomed to burn in hellfire for all eternity, I hope they make more movies before they go.

"Mail Order Wife" is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, and opens March 25 in San Francisco and Austin, Texas, with other cities to follow.

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