Big Gold Brick Parent Guide

Aspiring writer Samuel Liston (Emory Cohen) has had a tough time since being dumped by his ex and has decided the best way to get over the whole issue is to get blindingly drunk, skip out on his rent, abandon his apartment, and grab a bus for the middle of nowhere. Drunk, lost, and depressed, he soon finds himself wandering the road in the middle of the night where he is, unsurprisingly, hit by a car. The driver, Floyd Deveraux (Andy Garcia), is shocked and horrified, and upon Samuel’s eventual release from the hospital, offers him a job. Floyd wants a biography written, and he’s decided that Samuel is just the person to do it. He invites the young writer to stay at his family home, where Samuel meets Floyd’s wife, successful lawyer Jacqueline (Megan Fox), former musician and daughter Lily (Lucy Hale), and somewhat unhinged young son Edward (Leonidas Castrounis). While Samuel continues to try and get his life back on track, now with the added challenges of a traumatic brain injury, he becomes increasingly aware that Floyd may not be all he seems…

Big Gold Brick has a strange, tangential relationship with reality. The script feels like two or three different stories were put in a shredder and reassembled haphazardly by a group of blind chimpanzees as part of some bizarre experiment. There’s little or no tonal cohesion between the scenes either, but the film soldiers bravely on, stitching together its little quilt of incoherence with dream sequences and jazz music. It’s downright surreal.

You’d think that a movie with Andy Garcia and Oscar Isaac (playing a deranged Austrian business tycoon) would be all set in the acting department. You would be wrong. The biggest problem with the film, apart from the script, is Emory Cohen, who I wouldn’t cast in a middle school play based on this performance. He seems incapable of any subtlety, and bounces around the set like an addict binging on cocaine, mumbling through dialogue like he just learned the language sometime last week. This would be bad enough if he weren’t the protagonist, but since he is, it’s a catastrophe.

None of this is going to matter much to a family audience, since the film has a stack of content concerns higher than the national debt. Frequent profanity, adultery (mostly off-screen), and child drug use all feature in this strange little film and aren’t going to endear the project to parents. While I’m sure there is a coherent story somewhere in here, the filmmakers sure couldn’t find it, and I wouldn’t encourage you to go looking on your own. Besides, why spend money to see a rambling fever dream when you could just give yourself a concussion and heatstroke for free?