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| Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon in Bug |
Cast: Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, Harry Connick Jr., Lynn Collins, Brian F. O'Byrne. Screenplay: Tracy Letts, based on his play. Cinematography: Michael Grady. Production design: Franco-Giacomo Carbone. Film editing: Darrin Navarro. Music: Brian Tyler.
If Bug feels sometimes overburdened with subtext, it's probably not the fault of William Friedkin, never the most subtle or cerebral of directors. The sense that it can't be allowed to be just a psychological body horror movie probably comes from Tracy Letts, whose screenplay, based on his off-Broadway play, is rife with American malaise. Name-checking everything from the Tuskegee Experiment to Timothy McVeigh to Ted Kaczynski, it touches on sexual dysfunction and discrimination, the drug culture of the underclass, regional antagonisms, the military-industrial complex, the prison industry, political conspiracy theories, and ecoterrorism, among others. That it succeeds at all is due to the commitment of its lead actors, Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, who make the lost souls of Agnes and Peter visible to us. I suspect that on stage Bug was more of a dark comedy than it becomes on screen, though some of that still comes through despite Friedkin's tendency toward overkill and an apocalyptic ending that doesn't make a lot of sense.
