C.O.G. makes a magnificent case-study in the perils of converting prose to cinema. This adaptation of an essay by David Sedaris sets out to tell a great writer’s story without the great writer’s voice. In a way it’s admirable—writer/director Kyle Patrick Alvarez declines to plaster Sedaris’s words onto the voice-over at all times, instead working with subtle quietude, punctuated by disconcerting bits of percussion. But in the end, it doesn’t quite come off. The characters demand a precise treatment that the film simply doesn’t have.
I hadn’t read Sedaris’s essay for more than 10 years, and purposefully didn’t revisit it prior to watching the movie, lest I be too wrapped up in comparisons to view the film on its own terms. But as I flipped through the source material after the screening, I found myself laughing more at single pages than I did throughout the entire movie. The essay follows Sedaris’s time picking apples and doing other odd jobs in rural Oregon. The author expertly takes digs at his inflated sense of self-worth and the people he encounters, balancing his vitriol and bemusement with self-deprecation. On screen, in flesh and blood, the characters don’t quite feel as alive.
Jonathan Groff (Glee) plays Sedaris’s stand-in, Samuel. Samuel is supposed to meet his friend to spend the summer picking apples, but she ditches him, leaving him alone in the strange land with strange people who, he thinks, aren’t nearly as important as himself.
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