Evan Twohy's 'Bubble & Squeak' Is Misguided & Weak

On an idyllic honeymoon in a traditional (unnamed) European country, Delores (Sarah Goldberg) and Declan (Himesh Patel) immediately run into diplomatic issues. They are sequestered by a state security officer, Bkofl (Steven Yeun), in a sterile, office-like interrogation room and told they are suspected of smuggling cabbages into the country. During a traumatic war in the country’s history, cabbages were the sole foodstuff available to feed the population – to forcibly move on from the memory of the conflict, cabbages have been banned on pain of death. 

This state-enforced scarcity has given smugglers a lucrative but dangerous opportunity to reap black market riches, and it’s clear from the bulbous, baggy pants that Delores is wearing in the interrogation room that she has decided to roleplay a bootlegger for her romantic getaway.

With its boxy aspect ratio and oft-center composition, Bubble & Squeak signals its quirky, mannered comic tone before you realize every character will articulate their every inane thought in a clipped, deadpan voice. Wes Anderson is an easy comparison but an incomplete one – what makes Anderson’s symmetrical blocking and penchant for assertive but stilted characters so appealing is that his films are rich with humanity. The pristine form is broken with imperfections: naturalistic, spontaneous outbursts, composure affected by real frustration and passion. More than anything, Anderson’s films are moving. To be fair to writer-director Evan Twohy, Bubble & Squeak should not be graded against the standard of an influential and experienced filmmaker – the problem with Twohy’s first feature-length expression of his own voice is how flat and misguided his satire on modernity feels. 

Twohy’s film has some initial foundational issues, which give birth to new ones throughout. Our privileged, modern English-speaking characters ignorantly commit a severe cultural transgression that puts their lives at risk. The joke is that cabbages are such a random and silly taboo that Declan and Delores’ fugitive plight should become an absurd delight. 

But Bubble and Squeak makes the mistake of detailing its world-building with macabre trauma – a historic war featuring a brutal famine and mass suicides – so the deadpan American humor comes across as glib and tasteless. The cabbage ban is supposed to be deadly and serious to the natives, but it is constantly amusing to the audience. Matt Berry, Werner Herzog who plays secret police chief Shazbor, strikes a consistent note of amusing strangeness as he closes in on his target. However, the kitschy manner this foreign country is characterized as a quirky “Other” only becomes more grating. 

It feels like Twohy hammers home how myopic and self-assured his American protagonists are, by comparison, in a self-conscious effort to avoid treading into xenophobic territory. Declan is a nervous, risk-averse pragmatist obsessed with “decision theory” and the newest lifestyle optimization trend. He’s got a tedious job with a long title, and while Patel ably portrays the neuroses of a dry, twitchy modern man, it’s disappointing that his lively, expressive charm isn’t called upon in the film.

Sarah Goldberg fares better than her co-star because Delores is permitted a broader emotional range and a sense of adventure. Already tired of modernity’s ennui, the gulfs between her and her betrothed are bluntly spelled out as their escape progresses (most explicitly with the arrival of a familiar Hollywood comedian disguised as a bear). Apart from the fact that the film’s commentary on modernity is so stilted and vague that it feels no more current than 1998, every beat focusing on a relationship that we primarily view through irony-laden comedy puts more pressure on Twohy giving them an impossibly earned catharsis at the end.

Mileage will vary on the couple’s deliberately but not necessarily inappropriately twee resolution – though it must be said, any film, depending on an ironic remove, should know better to try for sentimental sincerity in its closing moments. Effectiveness aside, the conclusion makes it clear this was only ever a story about modern Americans in love rather than the country invented for a queasy comic backdrop. 

One moment sticks out as a microcosm of Bubble & Squeak’s misguided approach: With an hour left to go, a young local boy aids Declan and Delores’ escape by articulating a poetic, hopeful desire to shake free of the older generations’ appropriation of historical memory. It’s telling that this moment of humanity – which hints at sensitivity triumphing over the rule of an austere society – is first and foremost a joke. Neither American character understands what he’s saying, and the nuanced political wish is undermined by coming from someone under the age of ten. We reach the high point of Bubble & Squeak’s empathetic powers thirty minutes in, whereupon the film resumes its turgid comic rhythms, unable or unwilling to spot the better versions of itself just out of reach.