Crispin Glover Basically Played the Joker With the Power To Control Rats

How many actors have gotten as much mileage out of being a little freak than Crispin Glover? The man has spent untold decades peeling the wallpaper off of walls just by being in the room, comfortably typecasting himself as one of the all-time masters of giving you the ick with little to no effort. He became a household name with his performance as George McFly in Back to the Future but cemented himself as Hollywood's favorite freak in roles from the Charlie's Angels films to Hot Tub Time Machine. Glover has run the gamut of all the ways one could become a certified creep, from slimy and perverted to grim and in on a joke you couldn't fathom. If you thought him being an assassin who smells women's hair or the creepiest iteration of Willy Wonka was bad enough, those both pale in comparison to his turn as the title character in the underappreciated cult remake Willard, playing the role he was truly born for: a miserable rat man.

Willard

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PG-13

Horror

Drama

Thriller

Release Date

March 14, 2003

Runtime

100 minutes

Director

Glen Morgan

Writers

Glen Morgan, Stephen Gilbert, Gilbert Ralston

Producers

James Wong, Glen Morgan

Cast

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  Crispin Glover

  Willard Stiles
• 
  R. Lee Ermey

  Mr. Martin
• 
  Laura Harring

  Cathryn
• 
  Jackie Burroughs

  Mrs. Stiles

• 
• 

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A young man with an unusual connection to rats uses them at his own sociopathic will.

Main Genre

Drama

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What is 'Willard' About?

This film is actually a remake of a cult classic from 1971, starring Bruce Davison as a young man named Willard. He is a put-upon victim of a cruel world, stuck with a sickly mother who is an anxious wreck that depends on him for every little thing, as well as a dead-end job with a boss who despises his very existence. Willard has been taking this punishment for as long as he can muster, and he finds a reprieve in two rats he names Socrates and Ben. After finding them in his basement, he quickly grows attached to them and learns how to control legions of other rats by using Socrates and Ben as alphas. He quickly grows drunk off of the power they give him, using his rat army to get back at everybody who has done him wrong, gaining a renewed self-esteem in the process.

On paper, the two films are remarkably similar to each other, one may argue note for note, even. What separates the two resides in the tone and filmmaking approach — with Willard (1971) going for a straightforward horror angle, while Willard (2003) aims for a horror comedy in the vein of Sam Raimi. Willard (1971) was made at a time when horror films had an established air of respectability about them, aiming for pathos and treating the scenarios like they're real dramas, with the acting and cinematography following suit. It's all dark shadows, cozy catalog-designed rooms with dead air, and a competent yet flavorless sense of direction.

Most importantly, Davison's performance creates a well-intentioned man, perhaps a bit irritated by his circumstances, and views his rats as beloved pets who help him become who he is meant to be. However, this tactic ultimately backfires, as Davison doesn't sell us on his descent into madness, as it seems like such a 180-degree flip and the film's somber construction sucks any potential fun out of a very silly premise. Willard (2003) makes a smart shift in tone, squeezing more comedy out of its scenes, and tailoring the role to Crispin Glover's particular set of skills. That is to say, they let him go absolutely off the rails from the get-go.

Crispin Glover Is Perfectly Cast As A Deranged Loser

There is nothing normal about Willard, despite him looking like your average professional and wearing his dead father's cheap suit like it's a second skin. He actively resents everything about his life, avoiding his mother in his own home and rolling his eyes whenever she insists on him doing something for her. His generic job is run by a tyrant played by R. Lee Ermey, who's delightfully threading the needle between the typical bad boss à la Office Space and going Full Metal Jacket on him, taking every chance he can to grind Willard into powder for the crime of being late to a job where no one actually does a single thing.

In a manner not too dissimilar from Joaquin Phoenix's turn in Joker (even down to the setup of being stuck with a sick mother with toxic codependency issues), Glover shouts through a bullhorn how damaged Willard already is before the film even starts. He makes him a stunted child full of tics and flop sweat, who would fall to pieces if he weren't held together by that suit, which is the only thing he ever wears. While he can function reasonably well enough in day-to-day life, the minute any stressors come up, all of his anxieties come bubbling up, and he literally can't even keep a straight face. Like a haunted house mirror version of Jim Carrey, Glover has been blessed with a face that can twist and contort into any number of expressions that signify a deep existential pain that I hope to never understand, and Willard stretches his Mr. Fantastic face to demented degrees.

No scene exhibits the sharp distinction between Davison and Glover better than an important moment involving the death of his mother. At the funeral (where no one else shows up to mourn), a lawyer arrives, telling Willard that the house must be sold off now that she's passed, to which Willard has a complete meltdown where he screams about how it's unfair, and he didn't do anything to deserve this. In Willard (1971), Davison comes off like an entitled brat who's been given the first bit of bad news in his entire life, halfheartedly stomping his feet because he can't stay in his playhouse. It speaks to how fundamentally miscast Davison is as a character who's allegedly this lost in his own delusional view of life.

In the remake, Glover goes full nuclear explosion, stiltedly flailing his arms around, gripping his face like he's looking at the Ark of the Covenant, and screaming with a reckless abandon that makes you wonder how he still has a functioning voice at this point. The external filmmaking amplifies his haggard demonstration by making his skin look exceptionally clammy and his eyes red-rimmed, emphasizing the human rat quality of Glover's facial construction. Glover isn't simply airing his grievances like it's the start of Festivus, he's projectile vomiting every last pent-up hurt he's accrued out of every hole in his body, and it borders on the kind of performance art you'd see get parodied in a snide 2000s school comedy. As scream therapy as it may be, it still feels sincere, and it does remain in conversation with how the film successfully carves out its own identity: by threading that needle between bonkers comedy and genuine pathos.

Willard Succeeds By Having a Sense of Humor and Film History

Willard (2003) couldn't be called an outright comedy, nor could it be called a full-fledged horror. Most of the jokes aren't laugh-out-loud funny, and it's too quickly paced for actual tension to be drawn from certain scenes. Watching a cat get eaten alive by rats should be horrifying, except it gets chased around the house while "Ben," a soft ballad recorded for the original Willard film that's sung by none other than a young Michael Jackson, is playing, and makes the whole sequence morbidly ironic the same way that one scene from A Clockwork Orange is (you know the one). This comfortability with skewering any sense of good taste permeates throughout the film, and it constantly thumbs its nose at the idea that it can't enjoy its cake and have rats eat it too.

That said, it still manages to include just enough sincere emotional meat on the bone for us to feel invested in Willard as a tragic protagonist. Sure, it may be funny to see his mom get killed because rats ate her body after she fell down the stairs, but it's only funny because we got to spend time witnessing the Norman Bates-esque dynamic between her and Willard play out and be forced to appreciate how much her incessant pressuring of him contributed to his downfall. That way, we can feel both sad and maybe a little relieved that she kicked the bucket, thereby being put in Willard's shoes.

It's that undercurrent of empathy amid the ravenous glee that makes the movie into more than a pastiche of horror history conventions given a dollop of the Grand Guignol. If 1971's Willard was a film about Willard, then the 2003 remake feels like a film made by Willard. How else can a film that ends with our protagonist locked up in a mental hospital feel like a step toward victory? A notion like that only works if you feel like the film itself is possessed by the spirit of the character, and that only works if you have the character being brought to life by an actor completely consumed by his passion. Crispin Glover might have garnered a reputation for being "eccentric," but that translates to an irreplicable energy on-screen that's surprisingly elastic given how seemingly typecast he is. He's been a dweeby teen, an incredible smoker, a carnivorous monster, and even an inexplicably horny knight in a Disney film. But none of those could compare to the actual insanity that was his turn as Willard, our beloved rat man.

Willard can be rented on Amazon Prime.

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