Vern is certainly an anti-hero. He starts off as a cocksure child of privilege, then does a quick and fast spiral into selfishness once his dreams are crushed. Even though he isn't exactly a likable character, one does feel a good measure of sympathy for Vern - sort of a mixture of Al Bundy (Married, With Children) and Butch (Pulp Fiction). There are no shortages of sly references - my personal favorites were homages to Sergio Leone's "Spaghetti Westerns:" a used car lot invites potential customers to trade in their old car for a "fistful of dollars," a suspenseful scene of one character digging for buried treasure while being watched over by another character with a gun, and even a climactic showdown among three characters similar to the final confrontation between Tuco, Blondie, and Angel Eyes in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
A couple of the characters are introduced in a sort of Pulp Fiction meets Guy Ritchie meets Captain Morgan's commercial - a freeze-frame, a name graphic, and a voice-over from the main protagonist. As The Vern follows an oddly meandering path with two different story lines that eventually intertwine, this introduction is very helpful, but it only occurs at the beginning of the movie, and before the second storyline even makes an appearance, which makes it all the more confusing to follow. The second storyline - former high school sweethearts in a small Texas town whose marriage has gone far south of sour - is introduced in a conversation between the bitter wife and a male friend in which they talk about her dissatisfaction and ends by the wife stating her intentions to have the husband killed. This directly follows the scene in which Vern is given a letter from his son, in which the child mentions that his mother is about to get married, but the boy wants to see his real father on his upcoming birthday. Having a scene with a yet-to-be-identified woman seemed to imply that she was the mother of the child in question, rather than a completely different character, which just leads to further confusion.
The husband and wife who play a central role in the second storyline are introduced with a "human interest" type news story - its a great convention to use because news stories are perfect to summarize complicated plot lines that would normally sound horrible if a character tried to relay them. The only problem is that there is an opportunity for the caption/freeze frame effect and Vern's narration to tie both stories together so that the audience isn't lost in the flip-flopping. (If you’ve seen Burn Notice, they use this sort of effect to identify “The Client.” “The Drug Dealer,” or any other “Person of Interest.”) Though it will be a while before he actually "meets" any of these people, that will be easy to overcome with his bitter/sarcastic commentary.
With the rather meandering nature of the film, I found myself getting hung up on what I perceived to be logic holes. One of the main storylines in the film involves a signed baseball from Vern's last game, for instance. Now, it’s possible that I may have missed something, but I couldn't figure out why he had parted with it in the first place, whose house it had ended up in, and how Vern knew where this person lived so that he could steal it back. These sorts of things need to be a bit clearer to prevent confusion.
The visual look of this film is really quite stunning. There are many settings within the movie that are very difficult to do properly, such as sunset, nighttime, and inside vehicle shots. Quite often these types of shots end up washed out, underexposed, or badly lit, but in this case they looked great - with only a few exceptions of some over-exposed exteriors. I particularly liked the image of one of the characters silhouetted against a sunset; a visual that looks easy, but is very difficult to pull off. There was also a scene where Vern and two other characters unearth an item in the middle of the field in the middle of the night. The scene was designed to appear to be lit only by the headlights of a vehicle, and though it was likely supplemented with other lighting, it certainly looked as if that was the only existing light source.
