Throughout my viewing of Cheatin', the latest feature-length adult-content animation from the nimble pen of American animator Bill Plympton (I Married a Strange Person, Mutant Aliens, Mondo Plympton), my mind kept wandering to all the equally talented cutting-edge artists that the man's work reminded me of, and boy, what a list! From the French avant-garde humorist Jacques Tati (Playtime) to the pathbreaking early Disney (Fantasia, the 1930s Silly Symphony shorts) to R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat, Plympton is taking on the giants of the 20th century. But as I flipped through reference book after reference book while Cheatin' was rolling on my big screen, I wondered whether the dude was fightin' above his weight class.
Plympton comes into the ring with a host of accolades and critical raves that would seem to make him a safe berth for the smart money. Indeed, Cheatin' comes through the auspices of its own Kickstarter campaign, which reportedly exceeded its original goal. Also, as any aspiring filmmaker knows, shorts (particularly animated shorts) pad the resume, play the international festival circuit, and snag the low-hanging fruit of the awards world, but to pay the bills you gotta go for the feature-length sweepstakes. Having a highly visible big-screen theatre slot (if only for a week) alerts the paying public that they've not been flim-flammed, or "film-flamed" as Brokeback Mountain co-screenwriter Larry McMurtry wittily put it.
The virtues of Cheatin' �" well-crafted, naughty images, a sophisticated adult tale of seduction, betrayal and revenge �" would seem best-suited for the largest possible screen, helping to create the delicious illusion that we're "inside" the movie. The trouble is that the content of Cheatin' feels like a series of short "toon" loops, precisely the sort of distracted modern work that's most likely to be consumed on a phone or tablet. I would not be surprised to be pressed up against a fellow Muni rider who's streaming Cheatin' on the way to work or another form of playtime.
Cheatin's story is simple and very adult (the MPAA has yet to issue a letter grade, although it's hard to think it will be less than R, or maybe un-rated, today's version of the early-70s X). The only way I can see the film working theatrically would be for the folks at San Francisco's Roxie Cinema (where it opens April 17, and at the Elmwood in Berkeley) to run it continuously Noon to Midnight, and let folks enter and leave at times of their choosing. The story: A gorgeous young woman, Ella, is strutting through a carnival reading a book. A male barker hustles her into the bumper-cars ride, whereupon a big accident occurs. Ella is rescued by Jake, a thin-waisted, muscular creature whom only a cartoonist could bring to life. Jake and Ella bond, marry, and face an onslaught of jealous "other" women trying to peel Jake away. When Jake resists her, one of the women fabricates a snapshot of Ella surrounded by male mannequins. Jake is moved to despair, and relieves himself in a series of meaningless liaisons, the evidence of which enrages Ella. She hires a mean dude to kill Jake, but then decides to hire a magician whose machine allows her inside Jake's bedroom to spy on his "cheatin'."
With plots and subplots borrowed from films as diverse as Woody Allen's Alice, Stanley Kubrick's Killer's Kiss, and Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines, Cheatin' suffers from a form of cinema vertigo, a common dilemma in today's movie world where almost everybody seems to be "sampling," "borrowing," or "stealing" ideas and plots from everybody else. It's a technique that's worked well for hustlers from the worlds or rap and hip-hop, but here it feels close to exhaustion.
There are some nice moments, particularly when Plympton freezes on a pair of emerald-green eyes, then keeps changing the faces to whom the eyes belong. As gay male viewers have come to expect, none of the R-rated images resembles the male member, since even for hetero hipsters like Plympton, this would go over the invisible but real line that separates the hip from the unacceptably gauche.
In short, Cheatin' is a whirling dervish of striking images, some of which are lovely enough to frame for your wall. Whether the whole 76 minutes of the film are compelling enough to be ingested in a single sitting is a whole other question.