Dear Wendy (2005)

"Dear Wendy" is a pretentious film about some outcasts who form a secret group that tries to praise gun ownership and pacifism at the same time. While their little club with its pathetic rules and customs seems to improve their lives and empower their characters it is just a matter of time until things start to go wrong. The film probably also tries to pick up the controversial theme of gun ownership in America particularly.

I liked the premise of "Dear Wendy". I think it could have made a good serious drama about "losers" who search and find their happiness and satisfaction in an "intimate relationship" with guns and by sharing their obsession with equals and coming over their social disorders. After a while they would lose themselves in their obsession and also lose their track of reality somehow resolving in an dark and sad climax. But ... we sadly don't get that in this movie. It chose to go a different way, a way I did not like or believe.

The main characters are Dick Dandelion (played by Jamie Bell), Stevie, Susan, Huey and Freddie. What they have in common is that all of them are outsiders and socially unaccepted though we don't get much information about why that is. After Dick gets his hands on a gun of which he thinks is a toy, he kind of feels more attached to it and more secure when carrying it around. When his workmate Stevie discovers it and figures out that it is a real gun, it is revealed that he himself has a fetish for weapons. Sharing this interest makes them friends, empowers them and strengthens their self consciousness. Soon they start to recruit other members who might need help in the same way.

When the local police detective Krugsby (Bill Pullman) shows up the story gets more and more weird. Thinking Dick was a good guy he really wants him to be the "parole officer" for Sebastian who (accidentally as he says) shot someone and wants to avoid prison that way. This is stupid and from here on stupidity increases. Sebastian distorts the harmony of the group. Everyone seems to like him except Dick who is envious. But the tension is minor and soon forgotten by the group and by us in the audience. When preparing a (ridiculous) plan to do something good for someone else and simultaneously regain the harmony within the group we finally come to the point where something had to go wrong ... but the way this happens in neither dramatic nor believable.

The film has a rather comical approach and stylized look to it. I think too much of entertainment doesn't serve the themes here at all and the film goes way over the top and makes the characters feel hardly authentic but more like comic figures. That makes the whole movie feel artificial. Some/most of the dialogue is pathetic and silly. While there were a handful of laughs in there it were all stand-alone jokes surrounded by emptiness. Most of the time though they try to be funny and don't succeed ... and if that is the case, you tend to become preposterous and lose credibility and therefore the film can only be regarded as a silly popcorn-entertainment flick that is, however, not really entertaining. I was trying hard to accept the tone but when the plot starts to kick silliness to the next level half way through I was out! That includes the events as well as the behaviour of the characters within it.

Furthermore we don't get any insight on the effect the weapons really have and how they are empowered by them and how that affects their lives because we never get shown that. We only see the group in their hideout. The film simply doesn't show us anything besides the characters of the outcasts. The town seems to be empty. Pullman's character is not really in the movie at all.

The way the plot develops is dumb, the way the characters of Sebastian and another one (that I haven't mentioned in the plot summary so I wont do now) are introduced is laughable.

The ending doesn't make any sense to me and if the movie tries to say something at all, it is the wrong thing, it hits the wrong tone, its just all wrong. They don't achieve something with their behaviour and they possibly never changed and still are losers.

Well, I think I have said enough and I think this film is silly, pretentious and hardly entertaining.

I can't recommend "Dear Wendy" on any basis.