Folks passionate about All Things Theater — amateur or professional — are guaranteed to adore this modest Canadian dramedy.
Everybody else ... likely not.
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| After a particularly trying day at school, Les (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) receives some encouraging — if typically quite unusual — advice from his father, Buddy (Brian Cranston). |
The year is 1989, the initial setting Akron, Ohio. Carefree Buddy Smart (Cranston) has led his family through a series of temporary theater management jobs ever since marrying his wife, Macy (Allison Janney), two decades ago. Everybody pitches in, whether serving as stage manager, prop handler, ticket seller or accepting roles in the current production.
Trouble is, they’ve never been successful enough to remain in one place for long, after which it’s on to the next small-town theater seeking new management.
The indefatigable Buddy is a relentless cheerleader nonetheless, insisting that this time will be different; they’ll finally make it; and so forth. Every time the clearly overwhelmed Macy points to the grim result from their failure to put enough warm bodies in theater seats, Buddy brushes her off by insisting, “Everything’s going to be great.”
In a word, he’s exhausting ... but Cranston, so adept at body movement and well-timed dialogue, makes him endearingly exhausting. Most of the time.
Younger son Les (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), who worships his father, is fully on board; he’s a pretentious kid given to exaggerated outfits, with a tendency to quote lines from plays. During moments of confusion or crisis, he receives advice from dead thespians and playwrights such as Noël Coward, Ruth Gordon, Tallulah Bankhead and William Inge (each amusingly played by, respectively, Mark Caven, Chick Reid, Laura Benanti and David MacLean).
To say that Les stands out from his classmates is the worst of understatements; he may as well have the word “nerd” tattooed on his forehead.
“They don’t get me,” he glumly says to his father, at one point. No kidding.
Ainsworth is perfect for this character, which builds on his similar starring role in the cute Canadian sitcom Son of a Critch, wherein he also plays a kid struggling to find his place in the world. Ainsworth gives Les an appealing earnestness that makes him endearing, despite a level of social awkwardness that often makes us cringe.
(In a droll casting touch, Colton Gobbo — who plays Ainsworth’s older brother on Son of a Critch — has a brief role in this film.)
Les’ 18-year-old brother Derrick (Jack Champion), alas, has had enough. He’s tired of theater, wants instead to play football and be “normal.” Champion plays him as the stubborn “straight” character, wholly unlike everybody else in the family. Derrick, well aware of conservative America’s notion that all male theater people are gay, aggressively wants to behave in a manner that counters the assumption.
Macy, in turn, has grown weary of repeated failure. On a deeper level, as a religious person, she worries about her husband’s failure to find God. Buddy shudders at the mere thought, having been raised, from age 4 to adulthood, by two imperious, Bible-thumping aunts named Astrid and Reliance.
Rogers’ script is laden with laugh-out-loud zingers like that. An early scene finds Buddy summoned to the school office, because Les “acted out” after confusing the word angina — during a mandatory CPR course — with vagina. The subsequent exchange between Buddy and Principal Franklin (Cady Huffman, hilariously stoic) is priceless. Watch the delicacy of Cranston’s every twitch and line delivery.
Janney, also skilled at finely tuned performances, layers Macy with considerable depth. She clearly loves Buddy, but he’s constantly exasperating. More crucially, she’s crushed by how he fails to recognize her emotional needs, and the fact that he sees her not as she is today — wife, mother, the glue holding the family together, trying to be practical — and instead waxes poetic about the beauty queen she was, when they first met.
Akron doesn’t work out; the family winds up in New Jersey, “temporarily” living in a house in the midst of a lengthy mortgage. Les has been promised that, if they do well enough this time, they’ll get a guaranteed five-year gig in Milwaukee.
Macy’s gaze speaks volumes: Oh, God, not again...
Even so, New Jersey seems to work out ... until Les sees something that he can’t unsee.
Which is followed, like a shotgun’s second barrel, by the aforementioned hiccup in Rogers’ script.
After which, the film sags like a deflated balloon.
Chris Cooper compensates to a great degree, entering the story as Macy’s long-estranged brother, Walter. Cooper makes him quietly thoughtful, unexpectedly wise, able to “read the room,” and acutely attuned to other people. (In a word, everything Buddy isn’t.) Walter knows how and when to say the right thing, and Cooper delivers such lines with persuasive sensitivity.
Rolfe Kent’s often whimsical score is accompanied by buoyant show tunes such as “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (heard over the opening credits), “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “One” — a great performance by the family, while driving to New Jersey — “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” and many others.
It could be argued that this story is a classic case of “Life is what happens when you make other plans,” and — from that standpoint — it’s easier to be satisfied with how Baird and Rogers wrap things up.
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