Every addict’s nadir is different. Sometimes it takes ending up in jail for a crime they don’t remember committing for an addict to realize that they’ve hit rock bottom and must choose between getting sober and dying young. Alternatively, rock bottom can take the form of stealing from a beloved family member while in the throes of addiction, or losing a job because they showed up for work stoned or drunk, or didn’t show up at work at all.
For Wes Bentley, who rose to fame as the dreamy outcast in American Beauty, rock bottom, personally and professionally, entailed starring in 2009’s Dolan’s Cadillac, an adaptation of a Stephen King novella that was serialized in Castle Rock, the prolific author’s newsletter, in 1985.
It’s always a little dicey singling out a motion picture as the exact moment that your life had spiraled out of control, and you realized that you would need to seek help, or you would end up dead or in prison, because films are almost invariably collective, collaborative endeavors.
I’m sure that there were some people who worked on Dolan’s Cadillac who saw it as their big break, an incredible opportunity to work on a Stephen King adaptation starring Christian Slater and Wes Bentley. Others undoubtedly saw it as a decent gig that would pay the bills, if not a transcendent creative endeavor.
For Bentley, however, it was a grim reckoning that put him on the path to sobriety and a comeback. According to an interview with The New York Times, Bentley said that he thought that Dolan’s Cadillac would be his swan song as an actor, and that after it was finished, he would segue into a less glamorous career as a drug dealer and DJ.
That is absolutely heartbreaking. It saddens me to think that someone who had achieved such success in film would even consider something as humiliating as being a DJ. Thank God Bentley got the help he desperately needed and avoided a fate worse than death.
It’s strange that Bentley would single out Dolan’s Cadillac because it’s not a porn movie, or an action movie shot in Romania as a tax write-off, or a Christian movie where he pops in for two scenes for a quick, dirty paycheck.
Dolan’s Cadillac isn’t good or ambitious, but it is a ten-million-dollar adaptation of one of our most successful and beloved authors that casts Bentley in a lead role that Kevin Bacon was originally supposed to play. Sylvester Stallone was similarly cast as the film’s nefarious villain, Jimmy Dolan, before being replaced by Christian Slater.
Stallone is a much bigger star than Slater, but his presence wouldn’t have upped the film’s prestige. Instead of being a bad, direct-to-video, ten-million-dollar King adaptation starring Christian Slater, it would have been a bad, direct-to-video, ten-million-dollar King adaptation starring Sylvester Stallone.
In this adaptation of King’s homage to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”, Bentley plays Tom Robinson, a middle school history teacher happily married to Elizabeth (Emmanuelle Vaugier). While riding her horse one hot afternoon, she witnesses a sex trafficker, drug trafficker, sex criminal, murderer, natty dresser, and all-around bad guy, Jimmy Dolan, killing two coyotes (slang for Mexicans who help smuggle people over the Mexico/American border) and an undocumented migrant.
She drops her phone, which a member of Dolan’s criminal organization picks up and uses to learn her identity. When the couple goes to the authorities to report a wealthy white man killing Mexicans, a racist pig insists this is even more proof that people of color are subhuman garbage.
“These bean eaters will steal your dog and eat your dog, then kill each other for scraps,” he unhelpfully tells the caucasian do-gooders.
Our heroes end up in witness protection. Elizabeth learns that she’s pregnant shortly before her car goes kablooey.
Tom is devastated by his wife’s death. He loses his will to live and becomes obsessed with revenge. The teacher becomes monomaniacally focused on hurting Dolan the way that he has hurt him.
Dolan and Tom have an altercation in a restroom where Dolan has an opportunity to kill Tom and increase his already impressive body count, but he demurs, on the grounds that living without his wife and unborn child is a worse fate for Tom than death. Dolan doesn’t spare Tom’s life to be kind; he does it to be cruel.
The problem is that the titular automobile has bulletproof glass and other safety features that essentially turn it into a tank you can drive through residential neighborhoods. Dolan is a bad hombre whose depravity knows no bounds, but he’s also perpetually flanked by flunkies whose primary job involves keeping the boss alive.
Tom buys a big-ass gun, then realizes that it won’t do much to the titular automobile’s bulletproof windows. So he changes tactics and decides to get revenge in the most time- and labor-intensive way possible. It’s a good thing that the only thing in Tom’s life is a quest for vengeance, because it takes up all his time and energy.
Our obsessed protagonist gets a grueling, thankless job on a road crew solely for the purpose of digging a ditch large enough to contain Dolan’s Cadillac, but not big enough for him to escape.
Dolan falls right into the trap. It’d be a real waste of everyone’s time, including ours, if he didn’t. The third act is taken up with Tom taunting and tormenting the panicked and desperate Dolan as revenge for his late wife and the many other people the deranged criminal has hurt in the endless crime spree that constitutes his life.
Slater does his trademark shtick as a monster as verbose as he is evil. He speaks in painful monologues like, “In his experimental law of impacts, Sir Isaac Newton describes something called the arc of descent. It's all about kinetics, mass, velocity, the inertia of falling persons and things. Once a descending object acquires a certain momentum, it continues on a downward parabolic curve to eventually impact with an immovable object at the nadir, the bottom, thereby consummating the arc of descent.”
I watched Dolan’s Cadillac the day after I took in Is God Is. They’re similar enough for the King adaptation to suffer terribly by comparison. They’re both stories of revenge that center on a villain who isn’t just a bad guy; he’s the worst guy. He’s evil personified.
Sterling K. Brown is absolutely brilliant as Is God Is’s heavy. Slater is on lazy autopilot. The difference between Is God Is and Dolan’s Cadillac is the gulf between the unforgettable and the instantly forgettable.
I’m glad Bentley got help and turned his life and career around, got off junk and blow, worked with filmmakers like Terence Malick and Christopher Nolan, and appeared in franchises like The Hunger Games and Mission: Impossible before scoring a lucrative leading role alongside Kevin Costner in the hit TV western Yellowstone.
Something good came of Dolan’s Cadillac. For Bentley, it was a harrowing personal and professional nadir. For everyone else, it’s just another subpar Stephen King adaptation. As this column has conclusively shown, there are a lot of those.
Be notified the moment the Maniac Pixie Dream Girl Printopia campaign goes live at https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/nathan-rabin/maniac-pixie-dream-girl/pre-launch
Purchase The Fractured Mirror, my magnum opus about American movies about filmmaking, which has a foreword from Gremlins 2: The New Batch director Joe Dante and illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro (Return of the Blues Brothers, The Authorized Al), from me here or from Amazon here
Sign up for an annual paid subscription to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas at Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas and get instant access to all 20 Manic Pixie Dream Girl entries, 3 Fractured Favorites exclusive recommendations a week, the right to vote to determine which movies I need to review each week AND free copies of The Fractured Mirror and the “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book The Weird A-Coloring To Al! In honor of the 20th anniversary of Manic Pixie Dream Girls, it’s 20 percent off til October 1st! Take advantage of this special link here: https://nathanrabin.substack.com/MPDG20
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.