Institute History
Description
For all the creative freedom supposedly in independent film, relatively few filmmakers take advantage of that autonomy to produce truly original and risk-taking work. That is why it’s so exhilarating to experience Mark Gibson’s Lush, which blends genres as diverse as romantic comedy and film noir in a picaresque tale as inventive as it is ambitious.
Campbell Scott plays Lionel “Ex” Exley, the film version of archetypal rogue adventurer in the mold of a Don Quixote or Tom Jones, who has managed to drink his way off the PGA Tour. After a short stop in prison for accompanying transgressions, he makes way his back to his original habitat, New Orleans. There, after retrieving his clubs from his ex-caddie and renting seedy digs in a crummy St. Charles Street hotel, Lionel pals up with a persistently suicidal lawyer, W. Firmin Carter (Jared Harris), and begins a dedicated drinking binge that takes him to fancy soirees, country club lunches, and jazzy dives down by the railroad tracks.
The wild ride doesn’t end until his new-found buddy Firmin has disappeared, and Lionel is suspected of engineering his demise. In this complicated and at times fragmented film, Gibson has fabricated a fictional universe that’s full of byways and side streets, peopled by a collection of characters drawn from a myriad of sources and allusions. Weaving toward its wildly inventive final denouement, Lush reminds you that the limits of cinematic imagination are too often self-imposed.