There's something monumentally disturbing about this film and yet, you can't help but find yourself laughing at it now and again. A satirical dark comedy written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, the satire in this is biting, vicious and hits all of it's targets right between the eyes. God Bless America is the story of Frank Murdoch (Joel Murray) a divorced insurance salesman whose neighbors keep him up at night with their loud and obnoxious behavior and screaming baby. He suffers from insomnia and chronic migraines and he's at the end of his rope- he fantasizes about killing all three of his neighbors (including the baby in a shocking 'WTF' type of a sequence) so he can finally get some peace and quiet.
Instead, he wakes up late for work and winds up getting fired after a misguided attempt to be nice to the office secretary winds up with him being accused of harassment after he looked up her address to send her flowers. His ex-wife (Melinda Page Hamilton) is remarrying her new boyfriend. His young spoiled daughter (Mackenzie Brooke Smith) wants nothing to do with him and to top it all off, his totally disinterested Doctor informs him he has an inoperable brain tumor. Soon enough Frank finds himself ready to commit suicide but stops after seeing a spoiled sixteen year old (on a program not unlike 'My Super Sweet Sixteen') raging at her parents for not getting the right car.
Epiphany had, Frank tracks her down and handcuffs her to her steering wheel and attempts to ignite her gas tank. When that doesn't work, he shoots her at point blank range. One of her classmates, Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr) sees this, follows Frank back to his hotel and soon enough has joined him on a Bonnie and Clyde like killing spree across America- though Frank insists he 'only wants bad people to die.' So, a Tea Party protest- gone. A bunch of teenage punks that start using their cell phones in the theater? Gone. A church protest group not at all unlike the Westboro Baptist Church? Gone. A douchebag who takes up two parking spaces? Gone. A shitty television host that's a weird combination of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh? Gone. And finally, after a William Hung like contestant on a show quite like American Idol is subject to ridicule for the grand finale, Frank shoots up the live finale. (He and Roxy split up for a little bit after Frank finds out she lied to him about being abused by her parents but she returns to join him for the final shoot-out.) Of course, he and Roxy go out in a Bonnie and Clyde blaze of glory...
You'd think this would be ultra left wing porn, but it's not. There's something fundamentally conservative about this movie- as Frank channels Howard Beale in a rant before his final shootout bemoaning the denigration of American culture and ranting about how the meanest and shallowest qualities are now the ones most glorified by the culture and how he doesn't see the point of having a civilization when nobody wants to be civilized anymore. While Goldthwait correctly smacks the far Right for their part in the denigration of the culture, he also savages the permissive parenting and frankly crappy television that have emerged from the decidedly left wing Hollywood. (Frank is outraged by a show called 'Tuff Girls' an obvious send-up of the Bad Girls Club where one cast member throws a used tampon at another for defecate in her food.)
It seems somewhat ironic then that God Bless America is trying to make serious points about the lack of decency and the new crudity of our degenerate culture while sending its characters on a fairly graphic shooting spree- but overall, the message is a strange, thought-provoking echo back to the sentence that helped bring down Joe McCarthy: 'have you no decency, sir?' Goldthwait is asking that question of all us, knowing that the answer is that if we do have decency left, there's probably not a lot of it we use.
Overall: Thought-provoking, funny and decidedly unsettling- because you can look around at the chaos in our society and in our culture and although Frank's response may look extreme, you find yourself wondering if he's really that crazy after all. (**** out of ****)
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