I don't know quite how he feels about that notoriety, but it is beyond his help. He shares with Tommy Wiseau a totally earnest commitment to his ideas, as well as a complete and utter blindness to his own dearth of talent.
But make no mistake: Neil Breen has something to say and he's going to say it, even if he has to write, direct, act, and cater it himself. Fateful Findings is the work of a man who's trying to make the Great American Movie. What's it about? It's about everything. Life. Friendship. Romance. Danger. Politics. Corruption. Addiction. Mental health. The Constitution. Mysticism. Ghosts. And Neil Breen is the only one who understands them all.
Oops, I meant "Dylan." Breen plays Dylan, our hero, a bestselling author/computer scientist extraordinaire/extremely handsome man of action and mystery. He heroically shrugs off calls from his publisher for a new book, turning his focus instead to hacking into "secret government and corporate secrets" (his words). But someone in the government isn't too happy with what he's been finding...
Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. The movie begins with Dylan being hit by a car (in an effect which is, considering the number of clumsy hit-by-car sequences that make their way into much more professional movies these days, not bad). As he recovers in the hospital, he finds he's being visited by spirits, and may have been given special abilities...
Wait, I'm still getting ahead of the movie. We meet Dylan as a child as he's frolicking through the forest with his best friend Leah. They find a magic box hidden under a mushroom, with magic stones inside. Leah moves away and a voice-over narration tells us that Dylan never sees her again... until she turns out to be his doctor after he's hit by the car.
If that made up the entirety of the movie's plot, it would be busy enough. But Breen endeavors to make a film made up entirely of tangentially related sub-plots. I haven't even mentioned the neighbors with the troubled sex life, their daughter who has a crush on Dylan, Dylan's wife and her pill addiction, or the two psychoanalysts who somehow play into Dylan's mystical quest. All of the plots exist mostly to glorify Breen, who gives himself not one but two attractive love interests, and writes himself plenty of makeout scenes with both.
Virtually none of the plot threads are resolved, nor are they meant to be. The only conclusive moment of the film comes in a third-act press conference, in front of a green-screen image of what might be the Supreme Court, in which Dylan announces to an invisible but very audibly cheering crowd that he's, indeed, been hacking into governments and corporations all over the world, and what has he found? Greed, corruption, deception, etc. Breen isn't even interested in telling us what kind of corruption he's found. He simply cuts to a montage of reactions from four or five representatives of the corporate world, and what they do next is something I will leave for you to experience. I have to admit, I was floored.
Fateful Findings is a rare bad movie that I'd recommend to everyone, not just masochists like myself. It's truly captivating in its loopiness, and if Breen doesn't wear any of his hats particularly well--he's less a jack than a two-of-all-trades--he stacks enough themes on top of one another so that the film is never boring. It's no surprise that he makes up most of the creative crew for the film; no one, upon seeing this script, would have agreed to collaborate with him on this.
If Breen's two previous films represent the same paranoid, self-aggrandizing vision, they unfortunately don't have the same gonzo energy. In his debut, Double Down, he casts himself as Aaron Brand, a notorious computer hacker (Breen himself is an architect, and I can picture him delivering a Peter Cook-style monologue called "I would have rather been a hacker than an architect") who lives in the desert near Las Vegas because the government is trying to kill him. They've already assassinated his girlfriend: a sniper takes her out while she and Aaron are both naked by his pool (with nudity awkwardly obscured). He's visited by her spirit occasionally, so he can tell her things like "Thank you for loving me."
Double Down is, unfortunately, the most focused and professional-looking of the three. Breen is also the superhero of this film, and the fact that Aaron Brand is essentially a domestic terrorist who threatens 9/11-style attacks on Las Vegas several times poses the question of whether Breen means for him to be an antihero, or he didn't think much about those implications. I'd vote the latter, especially since Aaron seems to have hints of the same spiritual power that Dylan has in Fateful Findings. If Double Down is generally more restrained than that film is, Breen restricts himself much less as an actor; while in Findings he has to remain stoic and mild-tempered, here he allows himself some wonderfully unhinged moments in which he runs through the desert screaming.
Seeing as Breen has viewed himself as infallible so far, it's only fitting that in his second film, I Am Here....Now (4-period ellipsis his), he literally plays God. Clad in white robes, He returns to earth, looks at what man has made of it, and states clearly early in the film that he is "disappointed" in our "speechies," as he puts it. We've ruined the planet and allowed corporations to buy our government. Breen-God walks around Las Vegas helping the needy and meting out some Old Testament-style punishment to the wicked.
On the surface, this is an interesting premise, but overall I Am Here....Now is probably the nadir of Breen's not-exactly-illustrious three-film career. Even though Breen has a history of writing himself into romantic relationships with seemingly much younger women (even while playing God), I Am Here....Now is the only film that reveals a truly nasty misogynist streak, in a sub-plot that follows a woman who is laid off from an unspecified job at a green energy company and has no choice but to become a hooker. I know, I know--he's making a point about how corporations have the power to make or break us, yadda yadda yadda--but it's hard to imagine it playing this way if it were a male character.
The scenes which are meant to depict the horrors of gang violence are just as culturally illiterate. Breen's idea of a gang culture is a bunch of dudes hanging around a condemned building, most of them carrying machine guns openly, occasionally punching each other in the face or shooting each other for no real reason. A scene in which a character's hand is cut off, meant to be disturbing, is not far removed from Evil Dead 2.
Breen's lack of talent for storytelling is evident through all three films, since he elects mostly to dictate it to us rather than show it. He never shows us what he's hacking into; he merely tells us about it (and then hurls some laptops around his office). He can't show us the type of corruption being committed by corporatists; he has to have them muse at length about their crimes. An example:
Businessman #1: "Now that we've paid off our fellow elected representatives in the legislature, that environmental solar panel development bill will fail next week."
Businessman #2: "Not to mention the cash it'll put in our pockets."Of the three, only Fateful Findings avoids falling prey to the tell-don't-show method, and that's only because the plot is so ridiculous that it defies any explanation.
Still, Breen is an auteur. His films all have a clear through-line about corporate greed and environmental stewardship, as well as the reawakening of adolescent romance (I'm guessing Breen had a childhood sweetheart he never reconnected with). Strange motifs reappear with justification known only to Breen. For instance, scenes in each film feature characters lying face down with their arms above their heads; it looks just weird enough to have been done on purpose. As a matter of fact, that's a good summation of most of Breen's work: just weird enough to have been done on purpose.
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