What’s your price? What do you feel is the dollar value that you’d be willing to accept for your pain? Where’s the line drawn between greed and ambition? These are some of the questions that The Brass Teapot aims to discuss, the question I prefer to ask of this movie is are you interesting?
Ramaa Mosley attempts to disguise all of the morals of this movie into a quirky shell of John (Michael Angarano) and Alice (Juno Temple) who are this twenty-something couple who’re currently going through a rough time financially due to a lack of employment. Then they come upon this magical brass teapot that gives them money when they hurt themselves.
Like any pedantic speech that you had to sit through in high school where someone is partaking some infinite wisdom, you may find yourself dazing off into space because regardless of content of the conversation the speakers ability to engage is as important. In each path that the film wants to take it fails to do one of the most important things a film (or any story telling medium) needs to do; that is engage.
Is this movie an elaborate analogy meant to pass on a moral standing? Is it a passionate tale of the relationship between Alice and John? Is it a comedy? If the movie was here to answer these questions I believe it would answer a resounding yes to all those questions, but I don’t think it quite deserves all those questions to be a definitive response.
The Brass Teapot is a film which tries too hard to be too quirky, too greedy and too everything else. Even in the idea that it wants to sell that this greed is easily fuelled by evil; when the progression of the pain that is inflicted between these two characters in the film starts to reach to a peak it’s all too obvious and never truly allowing the viewer to have an opinion other than “sure, that’s not going to end well,” which we knew from the first time we had these characters question what they were doing.
Worse than any quibbling complaint I’ve made thusfar the one thing I can say that shines the most glaring light possible on this movie is that two days after watching the movie I can barely remember anything (that wasn’t already in the trailer) that stood out to me about this film. Juno Temple in her lingerie possibly, but once again that was in the trailer itself anyways.