Iowa

Review By: J.P. Mangalindan
JPMangalindan@TheCinemaSource.com

Drugs are bad — very bad.

So goes the motto of Iowa, which often reads like one long, nightmarish D.A.R.E. infomercial (“This is your mind. This is your mind on drugs!”). Indeed, newcomer Matthew Farnsworth’s “cautionary tale” of the growing methamphetamine problem in the Midwest makes drug use as attractive as anal warts and in doing so, is likely to turn off any drug-curious adolescent to the idea of fooling around.

Esper (Matthew Farnsworth) and Donna (Diane Foster) are a pretty typical pair of Midwestern lovebirds, whose lives are forever changed one day. After Esper’s father is mowed down by a truck and dies, Irv, brilliantly played by John Savage Donna’s father and also the man in charge of Esper’s father’s life insurance, tells him he’ll inherit $200,000 from the life insurance policy provided his father wasn’t high at the time of his death. To Esper, his father’s addiction comes as a bit of surprise. He and Donna do some investigating and stumble across his father’s “crank,” or crystal meth, stash in the garage. One snort leads to another and very quickly, Esper and Donna become a pretty typical pair of druggies, snorting and injecting, and eventually resorting to making their own meth.

Meanwhile, Esper’s mother (a wonderfully trashy Rosanna Arquette) schemes with her husband’s former parole officer (Michael T. Weiss) to get that insurance money by trying to snuff out her son. Somewhere in between, Weiss arrests Esper and violently rapes Donna with belts and ropes.

Judging from Farnworth’s interpretation — he based the script on five years of research and true stories used for his Midwestern meth documentary, Riding the White Buffalo — the Midwest is pretty fucked up. According to Farnsworth, the true stories from meth addicts were so shocking, so disturbing, they inspired him to make the film.

Critics have compared Iowa to Requiem for a Dream, and indeed, Farnsworth borrows heavily from Darren Aronofsky’s classic, not to mention other drug films like Spun and even Trainspotting to an extent, but taken on its own, Iowa doesn’t quite reach that same level as those drug-addled tales. While Farnsworth, Foster and Arquette turn in convincing performances, some of the dialogue is utter tripe.

“I want to get some dope,” Donna says to Esper after she bails him out of jail. “I feel so alone with out it.” Other lines, like Irv’s reference to unhygienic Mexicans early in the film, is casually irreverent, but also out of place and irrelevant in a character who otherwise, is really an upstanding father figure.

Partway through the film, around the time Donna is raped, Iowa shifts gears into a much more graphic state: