Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is the basic premise for many tales of woe. Shakespeare’s tragedies are largely built around the idea that a particular character overheard a snippet of a conversation at an inopportune time or had the misfortune to be arriving at the tail end of an epic age, one that they’re unable to sustain on their own weakened shoulders.
Likewise, it’s always disappointing - albeit sometimes hugely entertaining - to watch the ego-besotten fall, victims of their own hubris. Take for instance the recent severe contraction of the independent film distribution market and the announced feature film, said to star Colin Hanks, chronicling the rise and fall of Tower Records, of all things.
It’s with this in mind that August is, with some notable caveats, a compelling movie. Josh Hartnett stars as the ego-heavy co-founder of Landshark, a fictional “pure e” company that is looking for the funding to continue operations in mid-2001. That, as anyone over the age of 25 will be able to tell you, is about a week and a half before the entire bottom fell out of Web 1.0. And that’s just what happens to Landshark, as Harnett’s character amps up the charisma in an attempt to keep things afloat even as his personal relationships - including that with his brother and Landshark’s other founder - increasingly falter and fail.
The movie’s biggest blunder is in the casting of Harnett in a role on which the entire movie depends. His character has almost no progression or growth throughout the movie, moving from slick and desperate to slick and only slightly more desperate over the course of the hour and a half. He acts like a jerk to those around him at the beginning when things are still going relatively well, so him being a jerk to those around him when the walls start closing in does not make for what could be called compelling development.
Too often he substitutes rubbing his eyes for any sort of genuine emotion, and the constant references to his being a night owl don’t amount to anything, leading one to believe he’s either a hard partying swinger (not really an option considering how often we see him alone) or Batman, which just seems unlikely. All of this - the late nights, the changing clothes in the office, the constant combative attitude - seem to point to some sort of drug problem his character would seem to have, though nothing like that is even alluded to. Could it have been excised in editing? It’s possible. Again, this isn’t something I can point to, but the symptoms are all there and it actually seems notable by its omission.
Underutilized is Robin Tunney as COO of Landshark. She’s given about 12 lines and eight of those are rousing Hartnett from bed or otherwise chiding him for being late to an important meeting.
The one truly engaging performance in August is that from Adam Scott, who plays Hartnett’s brother and partner. While his role is filled with its own cliches (his wife and newborn baby follow him around like the car/driver identifying pointers in a NASCAR broadcast even when they’re not on-screen) but at least he attempts to clearly identify a Point A to start his character’s journey on and a Point B that he’s moving toward by the end.
Also making a compelling cameo is Jason Calacanis, who appears as himself. Calacanis, of course, was one of the media superstars of both the first and current web eras and his appearance adds a little (very little, actually) credibility to the filmmaker’s attempts at recreating that time and place. Having worked for Jason for a while before AOL bought his Weblogs, Inc, it was kind of fun to see him appear, though I thought his portrayal of himself lacked some measure of realism.
If you’re an online media watcher the film is certainly worth watching as a superficial and fictional case-study in Dot-Com Boom era history. If not this will have little to interest you as there’s not much to the movie itself.
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