MOVIE REVIEW : ‘My New Gun’ a High-Caliber Comedy

The deadpan foolery of Stacy Cochran’s “My New Gun” (Beverly Connection) should by all rights be off-putting. Instead, the film’s squiggly, unique humor functions like an embrace. The suburban people who zig-zag through the flat, characterless landscape might have stepped out of a ‘50s sitcom, except that everyone is slightly askew. The straight-arrow hubbie is too straight, the quirky neighbor too quirky. The lawns are almost surrealistically manicured; the two-car garages loom ominously. It’s a universe where normality is a species of weirdness.

This is Cochran’s first feature after completing a few shorts as a student in Columbia University’s film program. She has a distinctive sense of comedy, which, in film terms, is often the same thing as having a distinctive visual rhythm. Her on-and-off-the-beat style is particularly important in “My New Gun” because the plot keeps swerving away from where you think it’s going. Cochran baits us with over-familiarity and then knocks over our expectations.

The film is about what happens when Gerald (Stephen Collins), the straight-arrow hubbie, buys a .38 as a protective handgun for his wife, Debbie (Diane Lane). Debbie can’t abide having the gun around the house; its presence in their bedroom cramps her style and gives her nightmares. Her efforts to dispose of the gun set in motion a slapstick chain of events, but the slapstick is drawn out, low-keyed. The gun is at the center of a buzzing lunacy of events but its reason-for-being is never really called into question. It creates far more trouble than it eliminates.

This may sound like a tricked-up gun control treatise but Cochran doesn’t play it that way. The .38 is in the movie to set off its people; the film is really about how screwy life can get when something oddball bounces into the accepted order of things. The most oddball, at least at first glance, is Gerald and Debbie’s neighbor Skippy (James Le Gros), who lives with his spaced-out mother, Kimmy (Tess Harper), a former country-Western star. The pilot light in Skippy’s brain appears to be out but he’s a dutiful soul. His crush on Debbie has its puppy-dog quality but when she dazedly reciprocates his ardor, the confab turns into something almost soulful.

Diane Lane has had a checkered acting career but in “My New Gun,” she demonstrates again what a fresh and subtle actress she can be. We can see how Debbie has been practically robotized by all this suburban normality. When Skippy turns up in her life, she’s unhinged; her life, almost imperceptibly, becomes blissful.

Cochran has an affection for nut cases and “My New Gun” (rated R for language) turns out to be all nut cases, though what’s charming about the film is that a character like Skippy turns out to be a lot more companionable and sane than, say, Gerald. Le Gros, who was so memorable as Matt Dillon’s partner in “Drugstore Cowboy,” doesn’t act like anybody else; he’s a slow-pokey original. All of the actors are on Cochran’s wavelength: Harper is almost lyrically dippy; Bill Raymond, playing her creepy, estranged suitor, is like a David Lynch obsessive in a softer setting.

A few sequences in “My New Gun” are so deadpan that they end up dead, and the film, enjoyable as it is, never really rises above its funky minimalism. But it doesn’t need to. The small-scale pleasures of “My New Gun” are kicky precisely because Cochran has the good sense to keep things small. She’s a humane and gifted miniaturist with a feeling for low-key looniness.

‘My New Gun’

Diane Lane: Debbie

James Le Gros: Skippy

Stephen Collins: Gerald

Tess Harper: Kimmy

I.R.S. Media Inc. presentation. Director Stacy Cochran. Producer Michael Flynn. Executive producers Miles Copeland III, Paul Colichman and Harold Welb. Screenplay by Stacy Cochran. Cinematographer Ed Lachman. Editor Camilla Toniolo. Costumes Eugenie Bafaloukas. Music Pat Irwin. Production design Tony Corbett. Set decorator Catherine Davis. Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (language).