2.5 stars. Rated R, for relentless profanity and crude humor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.3.17
Portions of this film possess the
buoyant, effervescent spontaneity of the sublime jazz score by celebrated
trumpeter Terence Blanchard.
But only portions.
Lengthy chunks of the wildly
uneven screenplay — Art Linson, Jeffrey Ross, Richard LaGravenese and Lewis
Friedman obviously having been too many scripting cooks in the kitchen — ring
entirely false. The core relationship isn’t credible for a moment, and the rest
of the story can’t rise above that shortcoming.
Nor can Taylor Hackford pull
things together. The one-time A-list director of hits such as An Officer and a Gentleman and Against All Odds has stumbled lately,
with 2004’s Ray being his most recent
success. Love Ranch and Parker did nothing for his résumé, and
this new effort doesn’t improve matters. It won’t make a dime.
Other films have covered this
ground more successfully, from 1969’s The
Comic to 1988’s Punchline and 1992’s
Mr. Saturday Night. For that matter,
Robert De Niro himself did far better back in ’82, in Martin Scorsese’s
acid-hued The King of Comedy.
The Comedian is the familiar story of a
once-great talent grown embittered by the fact that people only recognize him
for something he did 20 years earlier. In this case, it’s insult stand-up comic
Jackie Burke (De Niro), who back in the day lucked into a wildly popular TV
sitcom, Eddie’s Home.
Two decades later, fans haven’t
the slightest interest in his current material; they only want to hear him
shout that show’s signature line — “AR-leeeeeeeeeen!”
— delivered every time his blue-collar character was exasperated by his ditsy
wife. (The echo of Jackie Gleason’s similar bellow, in TV’s long-ago The Honeymooners, seems deliberate.)
Worse yet, people insist on calling
him Eddie.
That might be tolerable, if
Jackie still could command headlines. But these days he’s relegated to the
likes of the tiny, half-empty Long Island club where the story begins: a
miserable fate that he has helped create, in part because of his spiteful,
intolerant tendency to diss people offstage, they way he insults them from
behind a microphone.
Much to the ongoing dismay of his
loyal but long-suffering manager, Miller (Edie Falco).
Jackie’s ill-advised response to
a heckler seated at the rear of that nightclub precipitates a crisis, a short
prison sentence, and 100 hours of community service. His penance in a soup
kitchen is one of the unexpected moments when the film springs into life:
Jackie’s spontaneous repartee with the scruffy clientele is relaxed, cheerful
and genuinely funny. De Niro’s laid-back delivery and comic timing are equally
natural, and it’s easy to imagine that he could have enjoyed an equally
successful career in stand-up.
Unfortunately, at this point the narrative
inserts the improbably named Harmony Schiltz (Leslie Mann), also serving a
community service sentence, after having assaulted her former boyfriend and the
woman with whom he was caught in bed. To say that Harmony has serious issues is
like acknowledging the Pope is Catholic.
She’s a mess ... but a contrived
and wholly unbelievable mess, and that’s where this film goes off the rails.
Mann has plenty of perky charm —
at quieter moments, when she’s allowed to display it — but she can’t begin to
get a handle on this character. Harmony swings so wildly between emotional
extremes that she seems in genuine danger of harming herself; at other times,
her absent-minded non-sequiturs are simply bewildering. Excusing this on the
basis of unhappy love affairs or daddy issues (about which, more in a moment)
doesn’t scan for a moment; there’s just no getting around the fact that Harmony
is a clumsy movie fabrication, and not the slightest bit real.
Her behavior makes no sense; her
so-called conversational banter is eye-rollingly fake, and the notion that
Jackie would find her attractive — as opposed to something best studied warily
from afar, through a telescope — is utterly ridiculous.
Harmony’s relationship with her
father is equally improbable. Mac Schiltz (Harvey Keitel) is a dodgy, clearly
larcenous Florida developer whose Svengali-like hold on his daughter might — might — have been acceptable were she
fresh out of college, but feels smarmy and decidedly unhealthy as presented ...
and yet, Hackford and his writers clearly don’t intend it that way. Apparently
Mac is simply overbearing, and Harmony — half-hearted lip service to the
contrary — tolerates it. Ick.
We also can’t help thinking,
given Keitel’s demeanor — and his long line of nasty screen roles — that Mac
would have had Jackie whacked halfway through this silly film.
All of which is a shame, because
various other relationships are far more credible, starting with the
steadfastly honorable Miller. Falco is never less than perfect, her line
readings as credible as the way her character has been constructed; her silent
sidelong glances also speak volumes. It’s impossible to imagine how the same
set of scripters could have created the wholly persuasive Miller and the
utterly ludicrous Harmony.
Jackie also has an
at-arm’s-length relationship with his brother, Jimmy (Danny DeVito), who runs a
Jewish deli on the Lower East Side. We gradually realize that the two brothers
actually get along quite well, or might, were it not for the fact that Jimmy’s
humorless, iron-corseted wife, Flo (Patti LuPone), despises Jackie. The
latter’s estrangement, sadly, has more to do with trying not to jeopardize his
brother’s marriage: another of the uneven script’s finer bits of subtlety.
Some of Jackie’s escapades ring
true, as he attempts to stage a comeback; others are as tin-eared as Harmony. A
spontaneous performance for the residents of a retirement community is
fall-on-the-floor hilarious, and just as smoothly natural as Jackie’s earlier
interactions with the soup kitchen visitors. On the other hand, a Friar’s Club
roast of beloved 95-year-old comedienne May Conner (Cloris Leachman, channeling
Phyllis Diller) goes nowhere, and falls flat in the process.
At other times, the film is
buoyed by an impressive roster of actual stand-up talents, most seen at work in
various comedy clubs, a few others (Billy Crystal) encountered by chance. The
list includes Brett Butler, Jimmie Walker, Gilbert Gottfried, Jessica Kirson
and many others, all of whom get an opportunity to be quite funny. De Niro’s
banter with Kirson is a stitch.
Jackie’s potential salvation,
ultimately, may lie with the unpredictable support of social media ... which raises
the story’s most crucial question: Does he even deserve redemption? Spending
two hours with such a misogynistic sourpuss is asking a lot, even if De Niro
occasionally allows Jackie’s kinder, gentler side to emerge. His
profanity-laced, scatalogically enhanced material also is breathtakingly crude,
and not for all tastes; at their worst, Don Rickles and Rodney Dangerfield
never were this nasty.
But, then, as newbies such as Amy
Schumer have demonstrated, modern comedy has, um, ah, “evolved” quite a bit.
All that said, it’s possible — if
only via intense concentration — to ignore the film entirely, and focus solely
on Blanchard’s smooth-as-silk stylings. We also get a taste of Art Blakey and
the Jazz Messengers, courtesy of Jackie’s phonograph player (no digital media
for this purist). The tight
relationship between comedians and jazz musicians dates back to the 1950s New
York/San Francisco club scene, so the musical palette is equally appropriate
here.
Ergo,
I advise buying the soundtrack album — should one be released — and avoiding
the film. The latter’s fitfully successful moments simply get lost amid the
bulk of a truly maladroit script.
No comments:
Post a Comment