Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Movies

Art house ‘Kumiko the Treasure Hunter’ struggles for laughs

PARK CITY — Rinko Kikuchi of “Babel” stars as a mildly deranged, or perhaps just really stupid, Tokyo office worker who gets obsessed with the Coen Brothers film “Fargo” in the deadpan comedy “Kumiko the Treasure Hunter,” which shares with the 1996 film a droll fascination with dopey but friendly moon-faced Americans.

Kikuchi’s lonely office assistant , who shies away from contact with anyone and has only a rabbit for companionship, becomes freakishly convinced that “Fargo” (which begins with a title card identifying it as a true story) is a documentary and focuses on a scene where one character buries a satchel of money in the show. She carefully diagrams the only geographic indicator in the scene (a long, stark fence in the snow) and dreams of going to the town of Fargo, where she plans to dig up the buried treasure in the bleak midwinter. When her boss at the office gives her a credit card on company business, she flies from Japan to Minneapolis where, in halting English, she finds herself relying on the kindness of a succession of goofy strangers (a cop who can’t understand what she’s saying takes her to a Chinese restaurant in search of a translator; a little old lady gives her a copy of “Shogun”) as she approaches closer to her goal, but her credit card threatens to stop being useful at any moment.

I appreciate the dry wit of filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner, but the movie is terribly poky as we wait for Kumiko to come to her senses (or perhaps die in the effort; the ending of the film, which is loosely based on a true story, is ambiguous but left me assuming Kumiko freezes to death). Moreover, Kikuchi plays Kumiko with a poker face that makes it hard to relate to the character, and the film’s laughs are, to say the least, uneasy given the undertone of mental illness. Commercial prospects are dim, and Kikuchi will not be scoring another Oscar nomination for this art house effort.