I guess sociopath is the new indie flavor
I watched two indie movies recently: Good Dick and Goliath. Since this isn't a board about Good Dick, I will just say the main actress in that movie plays a sociopath that pushes everybody away that tries to get close to her, and it was very disturbing to watch.
Goliath seems to continue this new trend. On the surface, this movie appears to be trying to appeal to the Napoleon Dynamite crowd. (And, like most Napoleon Dynamite wannabe movies, this comes with the obligatory hand drawn background art for no apparent reason. Oh, wait...that hand drawn art on the cover of Napoleon Dynamite had a reason...the main character DREW those pictures. Every indie movie with annoying doodles on the cover since then do it for no reason at all!) And, while there may be sociopathic tenancies in characters in Napoleon Dynamite, it never approached the level where it was uncomfortable to watch.
I am not against movies that push my comfort levels. I love quite a few movies that do that...Todd Solondz, for example, pushes my comfort levels in much of his work but he does a good job of it. There are consequences for his characters' actions. In Goliath, the main character is a dysfunctional social reject that displays sociopathic behaviors that are at the same time shocking and disturbing, and you keep on waiting for something to happen to counter balance what you are seeing on the screen. You wonder when will his neighbors call the police on him? When is he going to be fired from his job? And, quite seriously, when is the police going to be called on him? He does some shocking things towards the end of the movie...acts that border on a suburban Taxi Driver with garden tools instead of a gun. And, at the end of the movie, apparently nothing has changed for him. The movie apparently has a happy ending for him, and the character did not deserve a happy ending.
In other words, there's no character growth and there are no consequences for his actions. At a very fundamental level, this is a evidence of very poor movie making.
Further evidence of very poor movie making are scenes that just go on painfully too long. The document signing scene, for example, was meandering and could have made its point in being edited down for time. Assuming we cared about the point. But we really don't.
I don't know if it's a commentary on the movie makers' skewed sense of reality or if they are playing out some revenge fantasies they had regarding neighbors and co-workers they didn't like. It seems they want you to think everybody around the main character are idiots and morons, but all I got a sense of was the main character was an idiot and a moron and he was sociopathic and could not relate to anybody in his life. The other characters are exaggerated and more charactures than characters, only these charactures are not funny. The main character doesn't manage to make himself to be cared about by the audience, and this movie fails to make you feel anything for the main character. There is no reason to see him succeed at what he is trying to accomplish. In fact, you want to see him fail, and when he doesn't fail it only leads to further frustration. And this movie is already enough of a frustrating experience.
Avoid. Like a bad plague.