Originally published on April 15, 2010

Director: Michael Lander
Writers: Michael Lander and Ryan O Roy

I went into Peacock as I am rarely able to go into a new movie: Totally blind. Usually when a film stars Cillian Murphy, Ellen Page, and Susan Sarandon, I’ll have heard about it. Not so with Peacock. I hadn’t seen the trailer, hadn’t read a review, hadn’t heard a plot summary, hadn’t even heard the title. I knew nothing of its existence. It’s like it appeared out of thin air. Was I making a discovery? Was this some great, underground movie that I’d be able to champion long before it was set loose on the mainstream?

Answers: no and no. Note to self: when a movie stars Cillian Murphy, Ellen Page, and Susan Sarandon, and I haven’t heard about it, that means it’s bad. And boy, is Peacock bad. It’s about a man named John (Murphy), who is literally at war with himself. He crossdresses as his own wife, Emma, at first one guesses to provide himself with companionship. Because John is not the sort of person who can easily find a companion; his mother now dead, he has no one to look after him, and he’s such a stuttering, sputtering mess that it’s a wonder he’s able to keep his job at the bank.

But Emma is there for him. She makes him breakfast every day–always bacon, eggs, and toast–and leaves encouraging little notes next to the plate. I don’t believe that John is afflicted with dissociative identity disorder, like Toni Colette on United States of Tara, because it seems like a conscious action whenever he slips into Emma’s hausfrau get-up. Yet there’s some deep psychological rift that’s causing him to act out against himself, Emma slowly becoming his dominant identity.

Take, for example, the situation with the train stuck in his (their?) backyard. Within the film’s first few minutes, a train derails right into John’s backyard. This is the catalyst for Emma’s independence: it turns out that the train was a part of Mayor Ray Crill’s (the always delightful Keith Carradine) re-election campaign, and he wants to use its wreckage as the background for a rally. John is adamantly against the rally, wanting the train pulled up and shipped off as soon as possible. But Emma has other ideas. Gently coaxed by Mayor Crill’s wife Fanny (Susan Sarandon), she starts thinking for herself and decides that she needs to become politically active.

Cillian Murphy and Susan Sarandon in Peacock

What does all of this mean? The train, the death of John’s mother, the growing chasm between John and Emma? You tell me. He’s a little bit Anthony Perkins, she’s a little bit Norma Rae. Beyond that, I don’t know. The film plods along in moody, self-serious fashion (even the scenes in broad daylight are curiously dark), each inexplicable plot point piling on top of the next to create a mountain of shallow, lame-brained narrative devices that in the end serve no real point.

There’s a subplot featuring Ellen Page as a young mother/waitress/part-time prostitute that, as far as I can tell, is entirely pointless. She was receiving checks from John’s mother for some unexplained reason and comes calling on John for more money. John kicks her out, but Emma befriends her. Page is a great actress, one of the best young women in film right now, but the Fargo-lite accent doesn’t suit her and neither does the ponderous script.

The same can’t be said for Cillian Murphy, though. He’s an intense actor, one who throws himself into any part, no matter how small (see his brief but unforgettable turns as the Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films). He plays John and Emma–Jemma?–with spooky detachment, projecting a sense that they’re always somehow disconnected from the rest of the world, from themselves. Emma only convincingly looks like a woman in close-up or in isolation; when she’s shown side-by-side with Susan Sarandon or Ellen Page, the illusion is shattered. I can’t really blame Murphy, who does his damndest. Likewise, it isn’t his fault that director Michael Lander and co-writer Ryan O Roy give into writerly self-indulgence and artistic delusion. For such talent to sign onto such inconsequential, un-hyped fare, they must give good pitch.