Beat the Parents
In Domestic Disturbance, John Travolta provides a rare recent performance worthy of his fame, and it arrives bereft of the laughable facial hair, flaccid special effects and overwrought speechifying that too often render him paunchy parody. As Frank Morrison, a builder of expensive wooden ships at a time when they’ve been replaced by cheaper plastic models, Travolta seems lost within himself — trapped somewhere beneath the ticks and twitches of regret. Frank figures he has failed not only himself but his dead father and grandfather and great-grandfather, all shipbuilders; he thinks of himself not as an anachronism or mere obsolescence, but as absolute, total disappointment, manifested also by the end of a marriage that dissolved in the bottom of a bottle. He need say nothing to communicate his pain; Travolta carries it in his sulking frame and in blue eyes as watery as the ocean.
If Travolta has spent too much of his post-Pulp Fiction career playing larger-than-life figures — ultrathugs and presidents, alien warlords and self-righteous do-gooders — Domestic Disturbance offers him the opportunity to scale himself down; Frank is smaller than life, one of those guys whose potential long ago turned into an ash heap of regret. Not in years has he played someone so sympathetic. But Travolta is stuck giving a remarkable performance in a film so trivial and offensive that its mere existence is as loathsome as it is laughable.
At 88 minutes, Domestic Disturbance is less a film than a summary of one; it hurries through its story as though ashamed of the tale it’s telling. Frank’s ex-wife, Susan (Meet the Parents‘ Teri Polo), is about to marry local businessman-of-the-year Rick Barnes (Vince Vaughn), to the chagrin of Frank and Susan’s twelve-year-old son, Danny (Matthew O’Leary), who takes Rick for a creep. With his five-o’clock shadow at 10 a.m. and Samsonites beneath his eyes, Vaughn looks the part; he’s a dull cliché. That Susan doesn’t see it makes her as despicable as Rick. The movie quickly devolves into soggy pulp. By film’s end, what’s meant to be frightening — the sight of an adult beating a child’s head against the side of a car — is merely appalling, a cheap trick without point or purpose other than to provide the movie with a dreary climax.
Directed by Harold Becker, whose entire oeuvre consists of roller-coaster cars missing a wheel (Sea of Love, Malice), and written by Lewis Colick (Bulletproof), Domestic Disturbance is a sterile, hollow thriller bereft of any emotion — which doesn’t make it any less contemptible.
