Griff the Invisible

Rating: ***1/2

The notion of a singly-determined man to done a costume and become a superhero is not new, especially in the last couple of years. On the high-profile side there was Matthew Vaughan’s Kick-Ass, about a bullied teen that finds his chutzpah in a scuba suit, and on the low-profile side is James Gunn’s grossly hilarious Super about a man sent over a mental cliff after his wife leaves him. Now, offering a different tone is Griff the Invisible, which, like Super, originally bowed at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

But that’s probably where the similarities end. In fact, Griff probably has more in common with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s charming 2001 film Amélie, about a young Parisian woman who comes out of her vast inner world to make the lives of others a little bit brighter. Griff also has a socially awkward hero with a large inner world. And unlike films like Kick-Ass and Super, which uses superheroes as metaphor for escalation and power unchecked, Griff is about how the fantasy of imagining one’s self as super can make you open to the world in ways others may not appreciate.

Ryan Kwanten, whom fans may be solely familiar with playing Sookie’s dimwitted himbo brother Jason from True Blood, plays the title character. Griff, by anyone’s standards, is socially awkward to a fault. He spends his days working in customer service for an unnamed company, and is inevitably bullied by one of his fellow office dwellers (Toby Schmitz). But at night, Griff dons a black leather suit and runs the streets as a crime fighter, protecting the average guy from various ne’er-do-wells.

Griff’s world is thrown for a loop when he meets Melody (Maeve Dermody), the new girlfriend of his brother, Tim (Patrick Brammall). From when we first meet Melody, we automatically recognize that she and Griff are the real soulmates of story; Griff with his experimentations in creating an invisibility suit, and Melody with her belief that she can manifest the ability to space out her molecules and pass through walls. Griff’s feelings for Melody, and the inner conflict of crushing on his brother’s girl, forces Griff to go inside himself more and more, even as Melody realizes its destiny for her and Griff to meld their worlds.

The heart of the movie really is this touching and self-conscious romantic dance between Griff and Melody, and Kwanten and Dermody play things beautifully. It may have gone amiss in the past, but Kwanten can be quite adorable when his shirt’s on, and Dermody is lovely and poised. They both play understated really well, and don’t feel the need to play their parts with any kind of put upon quirks or ticks to reinforce the fact that they’re social outsiders. But the film’s script, written by director Leon Ford, confounded me in third act when it reaches for a plausible reason to make Griff flirt with normalcy just as his future with Melody seemed to be coming together.

What I did enjoy was how the film unfurled in atypical comic book movie fashion. Even Kick-Ass and Super, as much as they were trying to send up the genre, played right into it with villains and a climactic, winner-takes-all battle in the end. But while Griff is a romantic-comedy-drama masquerading in a superhero suit, it actually does a pretty good job of looking like one too. If you liked the world of Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, with its primary colours and cityscapes that looked like they were taken straight out of the comic panel, then you’ll love seeing the world of Griff unfold.

For a connoisseur of the art form, Griff the Invisible is uniquely different, but is still satisfying taste in terms of being a superhero movie. It’s refreshing to see a film take on the genre and not make it about how “in real life” mentally disturbed people can take the call to being a superhero as an excuse to do violence and immoral things to others with impunity. Griff is a sweet film, and it has a positive message that seeing one’s self in heroic terms and believing in the powers of self-made magic and ingenuity, doesn’t necessarily make one mad. It also proves that delusion, like love, is best shared with the one you love.