There is nothing particularly badly done about the movie Clean, but there is not much remarkable about it either.
For a movie about drugs, bad relationships, motherhood, prison, the entertainment industry, big city hopping, and a lot more, there is surprisingly few high or low points of drama. Everything kind of just trudges along. Which might be fine if there was also some humor. But this movie is not only lacking in drama, it's completely lacking in humor. There's not a lick of it. And there's certainly no action. What else is there? Art? Not really.
I was thinking maybe it was hard for me to respond to this movie because it focuses on a culture that I generally have an aversion to and little interest in. People who are looking for fame and reputation. People who want to be cool but are still interested in fame and money. How do I describe it? You know people who have no real personality, but a big ego, and listen to crappy music?
But I don't think I have to be initially interested in the culture that the main characters of a movie live in to enjoy the movie. For instance I just watched The Last Days of Disco. I was not interested in that era or the disco scene and honestly am still not after seeing the movie. But I loved the movie and loved watching the people in it. There was humor there. Ok maybe it's completely unfair to compare these movies too heavily, but sometimes I want a movie like this to enjoy some of the absurdity.
There were a lot of things this movie did that tried to keep me from getting really invested. One was the abundance of secondary characters that were mostly all bland and also remarkable. So much so that I didn't actually even realize there were two different characters named Elana and Irene until over halfway through the movie. I thought they were the same person! There was little to make people stand out. They all seemed so bored.
And another thing that kind of surprised me was the fact that Tricky played himself in this movie. I hardly know much about him except that he's in one of my favorite movies The Fifth Element and when I listened to his music I wasn't too fond of it. I'm not sure why but the fact that a real person was playing themselves was probably intended to make the movie feel more real, but somehow it made me feel like it was more fake. And then after reading more reviews I realized that the band at the beginning Metric was a real band, and the producer that Emily goes to work with and his other band Mazzy Star are real too. I guess what frustrated me more was the fact that the filmmaker's apparent attempt to make the world more real by using real entities actually was alienating me without my knowledge. Because I didn't know that I was supposed to expect certain things when I heard the name David Roback.
One actor I did quite enjoy was Don McKellar. I know he is also a director and have been planning on seeing one of his movies for a while. I'm a bit more interested now, not that I should necessarily base a person's directing abilities off of one small acting role, but maybe it may be one of the better things to come out of this movie experience for me.
And I also want to reprise joem18b's comment, what kind of a house lets you lock someone inside of the bathroom?
Rating: 6/10