Mercy (2009)

Wonderful Movie

It is a performances centric movie

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Absolutely the worst movie.

And it should be compulsory viewing for anybody wanting to understand the "Me Too" movement. We are introduced to Johnny, an oafish brat who leverages his minor celebrity status as a moderately successful writer to feed his predatory sexual instincts, which along with bar fights are portrayed as the normal behaviour we should expect from any healthy American male. Then he meets Mercy, a very attractive, intelligent and self-assured young lady who not only resists his superficial get-me-laid charms, but delivers a ruthless critique of his latest novel. If it had been a guy, Johnny would probably have punched him in the face and walked away. But he is intrigued by this woman and challenges her opinions, which she eloquently justifies, point by point, and he is smitten. That he seems to take the criticism on board wins him credit with her, and they start dating. The beast has been tamed, as Mercy (beautifully played by Wendy Glenn) brings out the very best in him (as a good healthy relationship should). She cancels her return to NY. He takes her to meet his father (played by real life father James Caan). Marriage plans are being laid. Then we see an even more oafish Johnny, shorn of even the superficial charm he had in the beginning. What has happened... where is Mercy? And we learn of the tragedy that struck the flourishing relationship. People do stupid things, but this contrivance stretched credibility a bit too far. Mercy gets out of the car and hurries to her appointment. We see her bag lying in plain view on the front seat, as if she had been sitting on it. Only Johnny cannot see it, and he drives off, taking her inhaler with him. Mercy is asthmatic and when the lift stops, she has an attack and dies! Women take their bags with them everywhere. And when one suffers from unpredictable asthma attacks and your inhaler is your only lifeline, you not only do not forget your bag but - as another reviewer pointed out - you have a back-up in case of purse snatchers and other eventualities. So tragic as Mercy's demise is, it has to be a strong contender for a Darwin Award. Allied to the unattractive flaws of the lead character, the nature of Mercy's demise undermines the film, although another strong female character (played by Erika Christensen) offers hope that Johnny may find happiness.

Johnny Ryan (Scott Caan) is a successful clean-living writer and a dedicated one-night-stand bachelor. At a party for his book, he falls for Mercy Bennett but she slyly rejects him. His agent Jake (Dylan McDermott) tells him about all the rave reviews except for one savaging by critic Mercy. He confronts her and they eventually hit it off. Some time later, he's bitter, angry, and disheveled. His friends Erik and Chris set him up with Robin (Erika Christensen). It goes badly and he visits his estranged father (James Caan).Scott Caan is unlikely to win any awards for his writing. It's a sparse script with a few bits of interesting dialog. The more compelling part is that this allowed him to do some acting. The emptiness in his life is compelling. It would have been great to have a better actress play Mercy. A switch with Christensen could be wonderful. This is an effective romantic tragedy.

When actor Scott Caan wrote this script, he did an amazing job of condensing a stock romantic comedy formula into one of the sharpest and most personable 30 something minutes you'll ever see. That section of Mercy is so affecting that even though the film only has one other decent scene in it, you'll stay involved with the story through all the other too serious, self-important melodramatics. The problem is that once Caan got to the end of the formula, he couldn't come up with any more plot on his own. This is like the move Jersey Girl, except Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez didn't have a kid so when Lopez' character died, there's nothing for the Affleck character to do but mope around on screen for another hour. And I actually liked Jersey Girl and also enjoyed this motion picture. Mercy is just another example of how writers today are so good at other elements of storytelling but can't plot their way out of a paper bag.Johnny Ryan (Scott Caan) is that classic romantic comedy stereotype - the guy who doesn't believe in love. Johnny is an author of romantic novels who's happiest moment in any relationship with a woman is when she leaves the next morning without being asked. Then, to the surprise of absolutely no one who has seen even one of these flicks, Johnny runs into a woman who blows right through his nonsense and falls hopelessly in love with her. Mercy (Wendy Glenn) is a literary critic and her charm and confidence completely disarm Johnny. Their courtship, following Johnny's clever and wonderfully character defining interactions with one of his heartbroken friends (John Boyd) and two happily married others (Bre Blair and Troy Garity), is entirely predictable and thoroughly delightful.Then the story jumps forward to Johnny's heartbreak after his relationship with Mercy has ended, which is totally done in earnest even though it's seems to be an exact mirror of his friend's heartbreak, which was treated as comedy. The story then jumps back to why Johnny's story is different and then jumps forward again to Johnny emerging from his grief and back into the dating pool. All of that stuff has an utterly different tone and approach than the opening rom-com fluff of Johnny and Mercy. It is dour instead of bubbly. It is overwrought instead of sly. It is about a whole lot of nothing instead of the reliable step-by-step paradigm of boy meets girl.The scenes at the beginning with Johnny and his friends and then Johnny and Mercy are so much fun and so well crafted that I didn't mind the film shifting hard into essentially a different genre, from rom-com to tragedy. The initial switch was so jarring and so unexplained that I lost a little of my involvement and never got it back, not even when the switch was later explained, but by that point I cared about Johnny Ryan and where he was going to end up. Once that happens, and you don't have to necessarily do all that much original or daring to make it happen, you'll follow a character's story all the way to the end. If I hadn't been made to care about Johnny, I would have definitely lost patience with this movie and its schizophrenic nature.It's almost as if Scott Caan wrote this script to prove he could not only create both a great romantic comedy and a great drama, but he could seamlessly weave them together. Well, Caan sure wrote a great rom-com. He wrote an okay but aimless drama. Combining them together, though, was pretty much a failure. It's probably a bad idea to begin with, but after the moment of tragedy that divides the two, Caan simply doesn't have enough plot to sustain the story. There just aren't enough things that occur and all the non-linear machinations of Mercy can't disguise that. After watching a series of events where two people fall adorably in love, the rest is nothing more than watching one of them be sad until the film ends.With the excellent performances of Wendy Glenn as Mercy and Dylan McDermott as Johnny's agent, this movie starts great and whimpers to the end but remains worth watching.

I suppose there may be a few less likely names for a book critic than "Mercy," (Miss Illiterate Fool comes to mind), but surely there cannot be many. I do not think the New York Times would have a food column by-lined "Al L. Yucky." If the best guy for the job WAS actually named that, they would have him write his offerings under a more suitable pseudonym, such as "Pierre Frenchman" or something. It's hard not to imagine tons of texts from publishers/authors/publicity hacks arriving with every novel's proof exam copies sent to Mercy's employer along the lines of "Please have Mercy on me." As a long-time veteran of the book business, I cannot recall any critics going by the handle of "Mercy;" obviously, any that were born that way saw fit to update before breaking into the critiquing game. Furthermore, most asthmatics who are subject to dropping down dead from the least little attack wear their inhalers on lanyards, with back-ups in their pockets. That way, if a purse-snatching brings on an attack, it's not an automatic death sentence. If your car keys were the only thing keeping you alive for the next five minutes, would you be constantly losing or forgetting them?