The best noir mysteries have a sickening inexorability; they pull at us and their patsy heroes with the irresistible grip of the hand of fate. In Novocaine, an odd hybrid of grisly noir elements and broad sitcom strokes, writer-director David Atkins seems too busy--juggling disparate stylistic elements, winking with self-conscious irony--to establish this pull. Instead of the dark whirlpool of Double Indemnity or the ruminative storm of the Coen Brothers' exquisite The Man Who Wasn't There, what we're left with, mostly, is conflicted murk.
Steve Martin plays Frank Sangster, a bored, boring dentist in a boring life, a made-to-order noir victim. Helena Bonham Carter is a sassy, slutty gamine named Susan who drops in with a toothache, but really aims to prey on the good doctor's vulnerabilities. She beds Sangster in the dentist's chair, and makes off with enough painkillers to satisfy a nation of Robert Downey Jrs., correctly assuming he'll stay quiet to keep his practice and controlling fiancee (an over-the-top Laura Dern) copacetic. The scheme unravels quickly, though, when Susan's thuggish brother (Scott Caan) turns up dead on Sangster's doorstep, and the dentist is falsely fingered for the crime. Atkins' film then veers into a gorier, slapstick-heavy version of the typical Hitchcockian wrong-man-in-the-wrong-place story arc.
The film, in Martin's omnipresent narrative voice, likens corruption to tooth decay, with small lies spiraling into bigger ones until an entire set of teeth is rotten. But the metaphor gets lost in this crass, uneven whodunit that relies on Martin's character to swing between crafty and clueless at the plot's convenience (one of more than a few plausibility leaks here). Atkins scores with some self-referential humor (Kevin Bacon as a method actor tailing real cops), and there are a few game turns from the players: Bonham Carter works her Fight Club schwerve nicely, and, as always, Martin's comic repressiveness tickles. But as a whole, Novocaine--wildly inconsistent in tone, and gratingly cartoonish in spots--is a swerving drunk drive. The film culminates in a scene that's supposed to be darkly funny. Instead, the ending--like much of the movie--is just bloody, and bloody preposterous.
