Ramin Bahrani certainly finds interesting stories. He can easily tell a tale about a homeless kid working in body shops or an Indian taxi business owner. And now we can add the Guinness Book of Records holder for the man who’s shot himself the most times, Richard Davis. Davis, the creator of the Kevlar bulletproof vest, is another fascinating find from Bahrani, who turns Davis’s life into another story of power and capitalism in the United States of America. Maybe the perfect one, with how important guns are to Richard’s story.
Davis’s dad was a war hero, which Richard would have happily followed in his footsteps if there was a war. Instead, he was stuck in Detroit in the 70’s/80’s as a pizza restaurant owner. After one of his delivery girls gets robbed at gunpoint, Richard takes it upon himself to stop these would be thugs himself…via an old fashioned shootout. To protect himself, Davis weaves a homemade bullet stopping vest that was much more lightweight than other previous models. The light bulb goes off, taking Richard down an incredible path toward maybe the most American dream that had ever been dreampt.
Even director Ramin Bahrani is impressed with what Richard does for himself. While the Kevlar vest is a great product, it’s Richard’s innovative salesmanship that brings his dreams to reality. 2nd Chance taps into all the base tendencies of the American heterosexual male: there’s copious gunplay, gorgeous scantily clad women, and movie reenactments a la low budget Clint Eastwood. Sex, guns, movies: the ‘Murica Trifecta! I might sound condescending, but Richard’s innate charisma simply won me over, completely earnest sounding and a, pardon the pun, seeming straight shooter. His earnest desire for the safety of law enforcement professionals turns Richard into a cult-like figure, especially in his small Michigan town where he sets up headquarters and hires family and friends to run the business.
And then Bahrani transforms from director to investigative journalist. He inserts himself more into the story, starting to point out cracks in Richard Davis’s foundation. At first these cracks are classic “rise to power” issues of infidelity, hubris, non – PC off the cuff remarks. But Bahrani is just getting started: he slowly wakes the audience up from Richard’s dream with his intercutting of Richard’s remarks and clear gaps in reality Davis fails to account for, at some points willfully so. Those benign hubris problems on the rise become bigger issues as Richard accrues more power: using his influence to shield himself from the bullets of responsibility, and sometimes reality itself. These issues all build to the Zylon fiasco 2nd Chance had to deal with, which had real life horrific consequences that wash Richard’s sandcastle of personality away via cold hard facts. As is true of many American Dreams, 2nd Chance sometimes smothers other peoples second chances for a more powerful person’s 3rd, 4th, or in Richard Davis’s case, 100th chance.
When interviewed about Richard Davis, Ramin Bahrani said that he was drawn to the man because of how many contradictions existed inside of the same person. These contradictions perfectly capture the American capitalist spirit in all its hypocritical glory. Richard Davis is just the latest example of a long line of people that can deal with these internal conflicts and just push forward to get what they want out of life: to make themselves the hero of their own story.