The phenomenon of the Superhero Film appears to have bifurcated in the past five years or so into two generally distinguishable but overlapping streams of cinema. To the left are the mega-budget franchise behemoths based on established comic series, a type that has reached a kind of cacophonous nadir this year with the likes of Thor and Green Lantern. To the right are independent films with an infinitely less glossy, more realistic approach to the trope of the costumed crime-fighter genre, often with black comic twist, including such works as Special, Defendor, Sidekick, and Super. There are fence-straddlers, of course, such as the muddled and curiously over-praised Kick-Ass, but most entries in the superhero genre hew close to one of these two approaches. Such is the case with Griff the Invisible, a film which typifies the low-budget indie superhero flick to quirk-laden, wheezing perfection.
The debut feature film from Australian actor Leon Ford (best known to American audiences for his role in the HBO miniseries The Pacific), Griff tells the tale of a flinching cubicle drone (Ryan Kwanten of True Blood) who assumes the role of a masked vigilante by night. Initially, the filmmakers present Griff’s crime-fighting exploits as wholly real, but cracks quickly begin to appear in that reality once the film roams beyond the self-styled superhero’s exceedingly unreliable viewpoint. By the end of the film’s first act, it is apparent that Griff is mired in an elaborate adolescent delusion, one which endangers his job and hinders his ability to maintain anything approaching a normal human relationship. Bland older brother Tim (Patrick Brammall) is earnestly concerned for Griff’s well-being, but essentially clueless. Tim does, however, bring his reluctant girlfriend Melody (Maeve Dermody) into Griff’s orbit, which kicks off the film’s central dramatic arc.
Because Griff the Invisible is, above all, a lazy indie film, Melody is an embodiment of the Manic Pixie Dream-Girl character first acknowledged by critic Nathan Rabin. Despite the childish nature of his fantasy world, Griff is an uptight and insecure personality, which naturally means that the spacey Melody will be drawn to him and ultimately teach him how to live life to its fullest, etcetera etcetera etcetera. To its credit, the film treats Melody with some measure of dignity and follows her own personal tribulations quite closely. However, she seems to consist of nothing but shallow, determinedly eccentric details: an offhand lack of material ambition, faux-deep nuggets of insight, and a possibly disingenuous obsession with crackpot scientific theories. There is a subtle suggestion that Melody herself may suffer from mild schizophrenia, but Ford—who also scripted the film—presents the character far too incoherently for such details to attain any real weight. Fundamentally, she is but a life-changing accessory, and gladly relegates herself to the role of Griff’s sidekick, the highest aspiration which she is evidently permitted.
This sort of velvet-glove sexism wouldn’t be quite so tiresome if Griff the Invisible contained any elements that distinguished it from the legions of similarly-afflicted indie romantic dramedies. Instead, the humdrum prevails: the greasy office bully who gets his comeuppance, the foreshadowed turning point that the film permeates with undeserved meaning, and the contrived misunderstandings that drive most of the third act’s conflicts. The most appealing aspect of Ford’s presentation is how little fuss he makes over Griff’s apparently baroque personal mythology. Contra most superhero films, Ford offers glimpses of a rogue’s gallery of villains that are never named or described, and hints at a traumatic origin story that is never elaborated upon. Similarly, Griff doesn’t linger on the incongruities between the comic book fantasy and cold, hard reality. Similar to the approach utilized in Special, select scenes are tweaked with computer effects to illustrate Griff’s hyper-real perspective. However, most of the heavy lifting is accomplished with mundane production design work, which features plenty of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it touches (e.g. Griff’s bleeding-edge HUD of the city’s crime hot-spots sometimes appears as a chalkboard, depending on the scene in question). These clever details are insufficient, however, to redeem a film that otherwise wallows so openly and yet so dispassionately in stock characters and situations.
St. Louis native Andrew Wyatt is the founder of the film aficionado website Gateway Cinephiles, where he has been an editor and contributor since 2007, authoring reviews, essays, and coverage of the St. Louis International Film Festival and Webster Film Series.
