Downloading Nancy is about a married woman, played by Maria Bello, who experiments sexually over the internet and eventually attracts a suitor who agrees to an unusual arrangement: he will want her, seduce her, and kill her.  It's based on a true story, and here the characters are personified by normally glamorous actors like Maria Bello, Jason Patric and Rufus Sewell.  The film is scored with a repetitive digital reverb-baiting two-note motif of a score and shot by Christopher Doyle with a blue-green lens that showcases the drab, wintery Northeastern setting, with its suburban homes of peeling wallpaper, empty bus stations peopled by meandering vagrants and hotel showrooms converted hours earlier from storage rooms.

There's a void in my stomach that exists upon seeing "Downloading Nancy," a clammy pit where nothing resides, and only later will I understand if it's a profound realization about my own personal universe or a temporary emotional reaction to the film, how temporary being the main cause of interest.  The film is not particularly well-made by first-timer Johan Renck, a music-video vet who wants to maintain the immediacy of the situation with frequent handheld cameras which still requires a needless excess of coverage in certain scenes (a coherent but discombobulated one-sided phone conversation is comprised of almost thirty separate shots at one point) and the filmmaker can't bring himself to avoid highlighting the many on-the-nose moments of dialogue between characters.  But the film has a hold, something ignored by most critics.



I hope to avoid turning this into an anti-critics screed, but being a film critic is more difficult than reading some books and watching a whole lot of films.  Sometimes you really have to live kind of a rocky, colorful, or emotionally volatile life, if not as a whole than during portions of your travels (and make no mistake- any critic of art should have well-worn shoes).  Which makes reviewing films like this and, more generically, drug addict films, as an example, inherently difficult.  These people have boring, empty lives.  The foibles lie in filmmakers who hold these people at arms' length, who acknowledge them as "the other" with their rteckless behavior and endangerment, ocassionally passing judgement in one way or another on their protagonists.  For strong-minded personalities, there comes a time of immaturity where you rush to judge, demean and devalue people who can't stand up to societal pressures, people who don't live up to expectations or make judgement calls of questionable morality.  Over time you come to realize that sometimes these people are "damaged"- maybe you can pull one or two from the brink, but few people can form a one-man reclamation crew, and as such, people like those depicted in some of those films, and especially "Downloading Nancy," become marginalized in real life.  These people can't, simply because they can't. 

As a critic, you have to offer up some sort of judgement often beyond "This/he/she/that exists," and the overbearing grey of empty vessels like the film's leads flummoxes some.  Perhaps its a class realization, but sometimes the movies get it right- these people can be viewed as shallow, self-centered and emotionally reckless, not traits common in the ideal film protagonists, but traits that sadly exist in the real world.  Renck isn't sure if he's going for realism the entire time- the spurned husband has a near-parodic obsession with golf- and that's a pity, because that decision foregrounds the complete emptiness of these lives.  Both Nancy (Maria Bello) and Louis (Jason Patric) are so plugged into their machines that they barely function without them, and their real-life conversations are awkward, sometimes curt on-off exchanges that defy rational conversational patterns.  Their interests fluctuate between the completely trivial to the gravely morbid, with nothing in between- witness the first scene where they meet.  Louis unsmilingly comments on how she looks "different" and she graces him with an anecdote that's merely a statistic about dogs in Europe.  All the while a derelict bounces between windows listlessly in the background, having a more human experience simply by drunkenly bumbling.



The question "Downloading Nancy" asks is salient: what's the difference between loving someone as an emotion or loving someone as an act for/against them?  Nancy has long gone through the ringer at the film's start- she's the product of an abusive family, specifically an uncle that has done severe untold damage to her reproductive organs, pain that she compensates for with excessive cutting.  She grew to understand her uncle's constant abuse (which we don't learn about explicitly, but we know involved excessive violence) as a form of love, a form of affection that she couldn't ever replicate again.  As such, Bello, so brilliant, curls up and requests comfort and aid, which she responds to with antagonistic behavior that leads her aggressive male companions to react with force, which leads to girlish, flighty giggles.  The universe has lost all meaning for her because this routine can never achieve a consistent balance, and the contrast between her desired savagery and need for love has only been compounded by a loveless fifteen year marriage.  While Renck fumbles in portraying a disastrous marriage sans explanation of its likely tumultuous origins, he believably creates the means in which someone will go to create a massive self-destruct, and the person willing to enable it.

Roger Ebert once had a quote that I agree with, saying, "Only bad movies are depressing.  No good movies are depressing."  Sometimes I understand 100%.  Other times I wonder what to do if your emotions are so entangled in the viewing experience that you can no longer rationally separate yourself from the viewing.  There's no sadness emanating from "Downloading Nancy"- there's certainly a glimmer of beauty, but its couched in very specific emotions that we frequently don't visit, by circumstance and choice.  In the end (or the beginning, since the film is told out of chronology), Nancy has found the right person to appreciate her and treat her exactly how she wants, and one can argue that, chemical imbalance and profoundly unconventional ideas of love aside, her soul rests content.  The film is based on a true story.