Joel Potrykus Embraces Absurdity and Futility in Slow-Burn Tragicomedy Vulcanizadora
For a solid stretch of Vulcanizadora, its title remains mystifying, even if you speak the Spanish necessary to separate it from its protagonists’ rusted-metalhead aesthetic. For the two people marching through the Michigan woods (who both fit into the category “boys over 40”), “Vulcanizadora” seems less like it refers to an actual tire shop and more like it was a random word the pair thought looked cool when they wrote it in the death-metal font of the film’s title card. And even when this haze is lifted and clarity sets in, you don’t feel satisfied. You feel like writer/director Joel Potrykus wants you to feel: Amused, wistful, and stuck mulling over his movie’s Beckettian mix of absurdity and futility.
As Potrykus’ unromantic Midwestern losers mature, so too does his filmmaking. But Vulcanizadora still feels like a natural progression of his slime-slacker milieu: At the movie’s heart, there’s still a ridiculous and upsetting idea, thrust upon desperate members of the lower-middle class, seen through to its tragicomic conclusion. And yet, it’s far more subtle in its images and emotions than the allegorical stuckness of Relaxer or the monstrous swindler of Buzzard, both of which also star Joshua Burge in various states of unravelment.
Here, Burge plays one half of that camping-trip friendship. There’s the competent one, Derek (Potrykus), and the underprepared one, Marty (Burge). At first this seems to stand in for their general maturity. After all, of the two middle-aged men, the one with the canteen and the hiking boots seems like he might be more put together than the one with the fuzzy Satan tattoo on the side of his neck. That Derek—with his toothy grin, long scraggly goatee and tufts of hair poofing out from the sides of his head—looks a bit devilish himself only contributes to the feeling that the duo walk towards their doom. As they march through the wilderness, accompanied by Derek’s incessant chatter and/or Radio Godsmack, the obscured truth of the pair’s journey shows its edges, like a buried regret peeking through rotting leaves. But even these answers only refine the half-smiling queasiness you feel.
Vulcanizadora is more obtuse and strange than something like this year’s Good One, another uncomfortable dramedy that undermines its easy hiking trip metaphor. Derek and Marty’s “boys will be boys” behavior (filming Faces of Death-like stunts, setting off fireworks, smacking trees with big sticks, pounding chips, digging up and leafing through porno mags) masks something more than midlife malaise. While the motormouthed Derek seems caught between 11 and 50, with his compass-handled knife and zip-off cargo pants, Marty quietly suffers and rages, caught between life and death. They don’t yearn for these juvenile acts of destruction. It’s just all that’s there underneath, once they strip back their bark. When Marty, in the dark of night, fiddles with an ominous metal contraption—somewhere between Bane’s mask and a Saw trap—the hints all add up: The two march towards a grim fate.