In making a film about one of the most notorious mass panics in American history, one of the most important things to get right is the tone. Sure, it might seem silly now, but when Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’
The War of the Worlds hit the airwaves on October 30, 1938, it scalded a frayed nerve that had tormented the American public for years: the fear of invasion. Fascists in Japan and Italy had already steamrolled their way through large swathes of Manchuria and Africa. Russia had been overtaken by a a brutal band of Communists. And a Bavarian madman named Adolf Hitler was casting a long, horrific shadow over the rest of Europe. It didn’t matter that the invaders they heard described on the radio were tripod-piloting, heat-ray welding Martians—they were the Foreign Enemy made manifest. And some rural communities, particularly those near the Martians’ supposed landing ground in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, experienced near cataclysmic panic. Here we see hints of the international paranoia that would define post-World War Two American culture: the anxieties of the Cold War; the fear of atomic annihilation. And yet in Jody Lambert’s
Brave New Jersey, a film which claims to tell the true story of what happened in the isolated New Jersey community of Lullaby, the entire debacle is portrayed as an occasionally serious yet essentially light-hearted romp. It seeks to inspire, not indict; to entertain, not explain. It climaxes with a hodgepodge of residents charging blindly into a fog-filled meadow in slow-motion while uplifting music swells in the background, informing us that each of these men and women have committed themselves to bravely charge the unknown! To respond to uncertainty with confidence! To fear with courage!
It’s magnificently miscalculated. If the acting was just a little worse, the writing a little more hackneyed, the director a little less competent,
Brave New Jersey could have been a so-bad-it’s-good classic. But there’s too much talent propelling this misfire forward. It arrives finally at mere mediocrity.
Consider all the cliched character archetypes introduced by the film to bounce off each other in the second and third acts. There’s the nebbish, nervous mayor Clark Hill (Tony Hale), a man who somehow got elected into office without the aid of any discernible charisma or spine. There’s the surly, disillusioned preacher Ray Rogers (Dan Bakkedahl) whose Dark Night of the Soul is broken by the “invasion,” spurring him to form the beginnings of a cult that views the Martians as God-sent messengers of peace. There’s Ann Davison (Grace Kaufman), a little girl thrust into the center of the madness after she’s locked up with the rest of the town’s children—including her Polish refugee cousin Ziggy (Harp Sandman)—when the panic first hits. And there are many others, none any more memorable, none any more significant. And when these characters start dropping F-bombs, the film’s aw-shucks veneer shatters so entirely we wonder why Lambert attempted such bland, Lifetime Original Movie pretensions in the first place.
Rating: 4/10
