The Very Unofficial Super Soaker Movie: 'Hippo'
What's black, white, and Eric Roberts all over?
Dear Moviegoers,
There’s something that I must first point out about approaching a movie like Hippo: One should go into it knowing nothing, and one should revisit it expecting nothing. This is a good general rule of thumb for most viewing habits to be completely enjoyable, but in the case of Hippo, it’s essential. The movie, on the whole, is a vulgarity of punk notions and taboo grotesqueness. It’s a trip into the dark woods of the late 1990s, where speculations on the new millennium ran rampant. It’s more than a peek at the remnants of a really nuclear family; it’s an atomic bomb dropped on America by weirdos, foreign and domestic.
Yes, this film is right up my alley. And I want to watch it again and again.
My first experience with it, on the festival circuit, resulted in a score of 5/5—an absolute personal favorite. And, in many ways, it still is. Narrated by the all-knowing voice of Eric Roberts, we see roughly a year into the lives of teenage siblings Hippo (Kimball Farley) and his adopted sister from Hungary, Buttercup (Lilla Kizlinger). Their Mother Ethel (Eliza Roberts) mostly keeps the two home and on the property, teaching them about the world’s beauties and ugliness in the most cyclical and protective ways. The brother and sister, essentially, are warped by this, and in separate manners. Buttercup is an Eastern Catholic who wants a child born from lust, and Hippo wants to play bloody video games on his N64 and train for a war that exists only in his head. For Ethel, she just confronts it all with baked goods and positive motherly kindness, even when her lessons are odd and damaging. She too is warped, from an encounter with a UFO during Hippo’s childhood.
How does this movie move? Where does it go? Read by Eric Roberts as a children’s book, the strangeness of Hippo comes completely from its character and characters, much like a Todd Solondz film. Here, director Mark H. Rapaport constructs a world just for this family, where they can live as delusionally as possible, insulated and protected from onlookers, but free to theorize on conspiracies and long for human touch most wrong as possible. The same can be said for Solondz’s movies, except that his oddballs are living out and about, only confined by their behaviors and feelings. But, both worlds are still very much by the laws and wills of their creators. That fact is both sickening and fascinating.
To wield such power over a time and place, over weirdos and misfits, like a mischievous god with too much time available for play, is dangerous for any one writer or director. Or worse, both. Its imagination most wild, and I’m cheering it on.
If Hippo ever left the home he so proudly never leaves - as if a fortress of his making and not a prison of his mother’s mind - he’d be a danger to society. As the film progresses, this becomes clearer and clearer, edging closer and closer to a violent climax that, as Hippo would describe, is most “sexual.” Not literally, as he protects his fluids and “plasma” at all costs, to fight the alien invasion that’s coming.
Poor Buttercup. She just wants to get laid by him and bear herself a baby.
Phew.
Upon a second watch, where I went in “expecting nothing” to fully recognize things I missed the first time, I found the movie to be a bit held back, despite everything the characters do and everything they want. Hippo is an iron fist-ed presentation that’s happy and proud of what it is, and it should be. But it also doesn’t go far enough. It’s always trying to make up for missing dynamism by escalating the actions of Hippo and Buttercup, not to mention the voice-over by Eric Roberts, which both surpasses and undercuts the story at times. Maybe its world is too much of a space case, needing a softer technical style. A slower one.
The movie has the pills that the characters desperately need and takes them in doses. Too many? Maybe the pills aren’t for anyone in and of this film. Maybe it needs to speed up here and there, with little to no stabilization.
If it were up to Hippo and Buttercup, the only thing stabilizing anything would be bullets and sperm—which go hand in hand, really. Imagine that. 3.5/5
Hippo is now available on Blu-ray at Vinegar Syndrome.