Rats are everywhere, just like people. They want what we want: warmth, shelter, food, family. The brown rat, also called the common, street, sewer, wharf, or Norway rat, probably evolved in Mongolia, then migrated by ship to every port in the world except Antarctica. With a 10-inch body plus 10-inch tail, an adult weighs 10-12 ounces. Energetic, agile, and diabolically clever, these critters' short reproductive cycle, large litters, quick development, and short life-span mean they evolve twice as fast as their #1 predator, humans. Their name has been taken somewhat in vain in "Rat Film," opening Friday at the Roxie.
The central thesis of director Theo Anthony's 82-minute film seems to be that although integrated, Baltimore's historically black neighborhoods, legendary rat havens, remain mired in unemployment, poverty, and crime. His approach is formal, poetic, and associative, but ultimately thin, strained, and incoherent. He fails to generate a feature's worth of footage from a demographic conceit. Archival photographs of rickety wooden structures compete with a map divided into socio-economic districts. Flogging frustrating footage of bad videogame graphics, he seems insensible to the difference between analytics and aesthetics.
Viewers' best hope is Eddy, a charismatic black dude, a rat exterminator for Baltimore City Rat Removal, who keeps up an amusing patter as he makes his rounds. We watch him drive around but never get down to the nitty-gritty, although he does pump beige sludge into the ground, presumably a mix of grain and poison. None of the people who request Eddy's services are interviewed. Surely there are rat horror stories waiting to be told that would flesh out the bare outlines of that archival map. Rats bite, eat, and kill babies; it's no joke raising a family in a rat-infested building. But Anthony shies away from human interest.
Creepy breathy female narration skewers three researchers. Dr. Curt Richter (1894-1988) was a psychobiologist whose rat poison, by killing hundreds of rats, simply provoked survivors to increase birthrates to compensate. David E. Davis (1913-94) was an animal behaviorist whose Rodent Ecology Project proved sanitary human habitation deters rat infiltration. John B. Calhoun (1917-95) was an ethologist at the National Institute of Mental Health whose studies of cooped-up rats or mice devolving into sterile misfits provide dismal parallels of human overcrowding and bad behavior. Photos misleadingly show Calhoun with mice.
The liveliest sequence involves men who like hunting rats. There's a white guy with a crazy smile and a collection of pellet guns who picks up a blowgun to stalk rats in his alley. There are a couple of black guys who enter a deli to buy turkey breast and peanut butter to bait a fishhook. The big guy casts his line into an alley and waits, while his thin sidekick wields a baseball bat. Eddy reappears to state succinctly, "That's where you're gonna find a rat. Where the uneducated people are, the ones who have the least. The least resources. The people who have no dreams, no aspirations, just survival. In a nutshell."
Cue the mesmerizing but entirely irrelevant story of Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962), whose series of dollhouse murder tableaux "The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths" revolutionized the study of circumstantial evidence. No rats involved, but maybe some societal breakdown? Montaging maps, models, and mayhem, Anthony has inexplicably overlooked "The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, or The Roly-Poly Pudding" (1908) by Beatrix Potter, wherein an enormous old rat makes a dumpling out of Tom Kitten. "Rat Film" is not to be confused with last year's thrilling "Rats," Morgan Spurlock's unsettling homage now on YouTube.