Marty Jackitansky is hardly a character who elicits empathy. I found his nihilism amusing but also wouldn’t have minded a bit if someone punched him in the face. To say he lacks ambition is to say Freddy Krueger lacks menace. Oh, by the way, there’s a running theme in Buzzard where Marty (Joshua Burge) not only occasionally dons a Krueger-mask, but he also designs a glove claw replete with Krueger-like fingernail blades. Marty’s violent streak is more of a sneaky one than a blatant one. He simply doesn’t care about anything enough to even get angry that often. He’s also a small-time con artist.
He insists on closing a small checking account and re-opening it to save $50 and seems to take delight (it’s hard to tell if this guy really enjoys anything at all) in insisting that any rules be waived that would prohibit him from doing so. He spends time haggling with telephone customer service reps to get things like free pizza. Then, in the first of increasingly implausible shenanigans, he routinely orders supplies for his mortgage company employer only to steal them and return them to an unsuspecting or uncaring sales clerk. When he is assigned to find and call the owners of undeliverable small-amount refund checks, he begins signing them over to himself. This guy is dumb (he had no idea what endorsing a check meant until his mom suggested he do so,with a check she sent him that was accidentally made out to her) but those who enable him are even more clueless.
Yet there’s more going in with Buzzard than the literally improbable scams. A sense of the absurd seeps in. After I was pissed off at this film’s inanity at its outset, about a half-hour in I burst out laughing. Marty is a consistently intriguing character. Director Joel Potrykus pushes the film into a deadpan rendering of a strange sort of social symbolism. He’s also his own worst enemy. Potrykus appears onscreen as Derek, Marty’s office co-worker and foil for yet more of Marty’s anti-social behavior. Derek is an eccentric nerd who prides himself on his “party zone” in the basement of the home that he shares with his ailing, offscreen dad. The film’s momentum is nearly toppled when paranoid Marty takes refuge from his work crimes in Derek’s basement. Two grown men play games such as seeing how many tossed Bugles can be ingested. They generally bicker, and dare each other. Meanwhile, Potrykus sees how many blackout fades he can amass.
The film finally gets out of the basement when Marty, on a dare from Derek, tries to con a sales clerk into accepting one of the bad checks, and is himself ripped off for a $5 quick-change scam by the clerk. Marty freaks out and before the cops can come, he’s off to nearby Detroit splurging with nearly the last of his money on a $180 hotel room. With the last of his cash (until he cashes a few more of the checks, which never seem to run out) he orders “$20 worth of spaghetti with chips.” In a long, Warholian take he devours the spaghetti with much of it running onto the bed sheets.
Despite it’s hinting at a topical subtext, Buzzard is more ironic stupidity than a political statement, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Loathsome characters with inexplicable charisma have a long tradition in cinema. Characters we love to hate but have something that holds our attention can save a film that would otherwise go flat. Buzzard could have been much more if it removed some of its flab, but as is, it’s a challenging vision of hopeless destitution–both of the pocketbook and the soul.