Crawl of Fame

William Friedkin lets the Bug bite — and doesn't stop there.

by Sam Adams

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As terse and slippery as its three-letter title, Bug charts the descent into insanity with the headlong intensity of a tour guide who knows he won't be coming back. Adapting the play by Tracy Letts (who also wrote the screenplay), William Friedkin keeps the action confined to the interior of a dingy motel room within which two lovers are rapidly losing their minds.

Agnes (Ashley Judd) is a solitary, strung-out bar waitress whose existence depends on not looking too far ahead or too far back. Peter (Michael Shannon) is a shy Gulf War veteran whose eerie calm masks a seething unrest. When they first meet, they eye each other warily, like dogs that have been kicked too many times. Agnes, a friend warns Peter, "doesn't much like strangers," and Peter tells Agnes that "women aren't really my bag." But he stays the night anyway, and once they've exchanged fluids, their mutual madness begins to blossom. They're crazy for each other.

The bug of the title might be the imaginary contagion that infests their room and soon their bodies, or the "blood-sucking aphids" which Peter is convinced have burrowed under their skin. It might refer to Peter's conviction that they're under constant government surveillance. Or it might simply be the simplest way of describing their mutually agreed-upon delusion, which gives new meaning to the word "bugfuck."

Even before Agnes and Peter smash into each other, Friedkin instills a pervasive sense of unease. Rather than limiting the director's imagination, the movie's claustrophobic setting inspires a welter of odd angles and jittery moves, like the flurry of unnerving zooms as Judd makes herself a drunk's breakfast. The camera works in close, often closer than you want to be, then cuts abruptly to a helicopter shot of the isolated motel shining in the desert, the sound of rotor blades thrumming through the speakers. The peal and rattle of a ringing phone (no electronic bleep here) cuts straight into your brain. There is, of course, no one on the other end.

A younger director might rush headlong into the mouth of madness, but Friedkin keeps changing speeds. Just when you think the characters are about to fall off the edge of the Earth, the movie pulls back, using secondary characters to throw off the balance. As Agnes' abusive ex-con of a husband, Harry Connick Jr. thrusts himself priapically into a scene, entering the room like a fist coming through a wall. He's unstable in his own way, professing his love for Agnes one second and socking her in the jaw the next, but it's a familiar kind of volatility, his way of making himself felt in the world.

Agnes and Peter, by contrast, wrap themselves in madness as a way of keeping others out, replacing their individual traumas with a shared one only they can understand. The aphids under their skin are the only thing they can truly call their own.

Although the motel room grows more and more unearthly as the couple redecorates it in line with their growing paranoia (an opening flash of a bloodied body lying in a foil-lined corner gives a hint as to where this will end up), Bug never encourages us to share the lovers' insanity. (It lacks, for example, the internal cohesion of David Thewlis' desperate ranting in Naked, which for a second almost succeeds in convincing you that UPC codes are a sign of the apocalypse.) But the movie shows how easy it is for the mind to turn off course, and once there to blast ahead full speed. Once Agnes has accepted the idea that her home is crawling with government-bred parasites, it's a simple matter to rearrange her mental landscape so that friends become enemies, inexplicable tragedies part of a long-running conspiracy. In some ways, her world makes more sense with bugs in it than without.

For years, I wondered if the frightening intensity of Judd's performance in 1995's Smoke was a fluke, or a solitary convergence of actor and material. As a pregnant crack addict confronting her long-vanished father, Judd's anger burst forth with such force it seemed that if she ran out of words she might gnaw her own face off. But the roles that followed were nondescript and then disheartening, especially the string of lifeless woman-in-trouble thrillers that showed off little more than her trim physique.

But in Bug, hurt and anger flow through her like an electric current, at once energizing her and cooking her alive. She falters only once Agnes' doubts are extinguished and her madness has nothing to push against. Shannon, reprising his part from the stage production, has the showier role, and I think the less interesting one, since he seems to have no say in his own disintegration. But every once in a while, he'll throw an unexpected hiccup into his deranged rant, and you'll start watching him all over again. There's not much humor in Bug, but when Judd and Shannon start throwing change-ups, it's like watching two old-school comedians try to break each other up. It may not be funny, but it's amusing as hell.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Bug

Directed by William FriedkinA Lionsgate release