Nicole Kidman as the wilful Charlotte Bless in The Paperboy.

Nicole Kidman as the wilful Charlotte Bless in The Paperboy. Photo: Supplied

THE PAPERBOY (MA)  

Stars Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron; directed by Lee Daniels; 108 minutes.

Four and a half stars


Here's a film that puts the recent Oscar contenders in the shade. Having scored a hit with his over-the-top message movie Precious, the director Lee Daniels has found the courage to let it all hang out.

The result is lurid, kinky, and sometimes absurd - but if you can get on board, there's no reason any of that should be a problem.

Based on a novel by Pete Dexter - who co-wrote the script with Daniels - the film takes place in Florida over the long, hot summer of 1969.

The story is told in voice-over by Anita (Macy Gray), a black maid who spends her time looking after Jack (Zac Efron), a college drop-out whose mother vanished long ago.

The film is supposedly a mystery thriller, though many plot details remain murky. Jack's brother Ward (Matthew McConaughey) is a reporter on a crusade to free Hilary (John Cusack) an unlovely prisoner on death row. He's joined in this mission by another reporter, Yardley (David Oyelowo), who's black and speaks with a British accent, and by Hilary's long-distance girlfriend Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), a middle-aged sexpot with a thing for men in jail.

For a while they form a kind of gang, bound together by a range of barely-repressed desires. It resembles a sultry daydream; menace lurks everywhere, but Daniels has other things on his mind than narrative momentum. Not since Tarantino's Death Proof has a film seemed so turned on by everything in the frame: Efron sprawled in his white underpants, Kidman's blonde hair, trashy outfits and candy-pink lipstick, McConaughey looking lean, hangdog and ready to pounce.

Like Moonrise Kingdom - an otherwise radically different period piece - The Paperboy is shot in widescreen on 16-millimetre film, harking back to the 1960s in style and content. Long lenses flatten space, jamming bodies together and maximising a sense of clutter; eccentric editing patterns suggest that the camera is trying to get in as close as possible, from every angle at once.

Weird free-associative montage sequences evoke sexual fantasy run amok; superimpositions and passages of slow motion suggest that the film itself is coming unglued, melting in the heat. Even the heavy grain of the celluloid is seductive: the images seem made to be touched.

For all the wilful sleaze - and occasional ghastly violence - it's clear Daniels likes his characters and enjoys their company. Though Kidman goes to town in the star role, she avoids turning Charlotte into a pathetic nymphomaniac out of Tennessee Williams: typical of Daniels' perverse political correctness is the implication that she deserves respect, as a woman who well and truly knows what she wants.