This seems to be “veteran Hollywood royalty” season, with both Michael Caine and Clint Eastwood starring in new films, at the respective ages of 88 and 91 years young.
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| Lucy (Aubrey Plaza) suspiciously regards her client, Harris Shaw (Michael Caine), when — totally out of character — he offers her some early-morning coffee as she awakens after a horrific evening of binge-drinking. |
Anthony Grieco’s original script is a cheeky dissection of the tumultuous — and highly uncertain — role of traditional publishing houses in this era of paper-less social media millennials. Book people will love it, as they’re given plenty of opportunities to snicker at the vacuousness of tweets and “likes” … but Grieco is sly enough to suggest that (as always) collaboration may offer advantages to both sides.
Aubrey Plaza co-stars as the bright and personable Lucy Stanbridge, who has assumed control of the boutique Manhattan publishing house founded by her father. Alas, issuing far too many mediocre young adult titles has pushed the firm to near-insolvency, which makes a buyout bid from the smirking Jack Sinclair (Scott Speedman, appropriately smarmy) increasingly tempting.
The fact that he’s also a former lover is salt in the wound.
Lucy becomes desperate. She and her sole loyal assistant, Rachel (Ellen Wong), comb the files of past glories, hoping for a miracle … and they find one. Half a century earlier, Shaw’s debut novel, Atomic Autumn, helped put Stanbridge Books on the map. Subsequent to that auspicious splash, he accepted a $25,000 advance for a second book … which he never delivered.
Trouble is, Shaw hasn’t been heard of since then; he pulled a Harper Lee and withdrew into total seclusion. “Is he even alive?” Rachel quite reasonably wonders.
He is, and — in fact — has just completed a massive magnum opus dubbed The Future Is X-Rated: a coffee- and scotch-stained manuscript that could serve as a doorstop. Unfortunately, the crotchety Shaw — whose only companion is an adorably attentive cat — has a tendency to greet visitors with a rifle. As Lucy and Rachel soon discover.
But Lucy is resolute; Shaw, probably hoping to see the back of them, hurls the manuscript at her. But Lucy’s father apparently knew a thing or two about Shaw, and the contract includes an additional detail: If Shaw doesn’t agree to a book tour, the publisher — now Lucy — has the right to edit the manuscript as she sees fit.
Apoplectic over the mere thought of any of his precious words being tampered with, Shaw grouchily agrees to the tour. But, he recognizes, nothing in the contract specifies the way he must behave. Stanbridge publishes the book, and ships it out to stores; Shaw demands that she become his driver, in his ancient British car (driver’s side right).
Adding further insult to this demeaning request, he sits in the back, demoting her to a de facto chauffeur.
Caine throws everything he’s got into this breathtakingly nasty portrayal of a Cranky Old Bastard. Shaw hurls F-bombs and saliva with equal disregard, insults everybody in his orbit, and treats the increasingly stressed Lucy with not-at-all-disguised contempt. Indeed — as it goes on and on and on — Caine is in serious danger of going too far, past the point redemption. (Constant Companion wanted to reach into the screen and rip his eyes out.)
Ah, but Roessler’s otherwise whimsical and light-hearted touch is too telling; there’s no way this insufferable behavior can continue forever. More to the point, we wonder where all of Shaw’s anger springs from: What has made his life so miserable?
Predictably, the first few tour stops are a complete disaster. At one, Shaw — drunk and disheveled — reads X-rated letters from Penthouse magazine. At another, he stares at his open book and merely repeats the word “Bullshite” several hundred times.
Recognizing that Shaw’s unpredictable behavior is wholly wrong for the refined bookstore atmosphere — and remembering that he gained fame, back in the day, by reading sections of Atomic Autumn in a bar — Lucy and Rachel re-schedule the rest of the tour into a series of similarly dive-y watering holes.
This being the age of ubiquitous smart phones, Shaw’s “Bullshite” performance begins to trend. “You should sell T-shirts,” advises an otherwise disinterested patron, at one of the next bar stops. All well and good, Lucy realizes, but social media isn’t selling books.
What to do?
Plaza always excels at playing frustrated and aggrieved, and her handling of Lucy is sublime. The poor woman’s increasingly desperate actions are simultaneously funny and tragic, as she tries — somehow, anyhow — to even understand her irascible companion, let alone connect with him in some meaningful manner. At wit’s end, she soon embraces the cigars and Johnny Walker Black Label that he demands she fetch each evening, following his most recent disastrous performance, when they retire to adjacent motel rooms.
We ache for her.
At first blush, Wong plays Rachel for comic relief; her chatterbox trepidation, when she and Lucy approach Shaw’s house the first time, is hilarious. But Rachel grows into her responsibilities, when left to run the office in Lucy’s absence (and also left in charge of Shaw’s cat). Rachel evolves nicely, just as Lucy and even Harris (eventually) must.
Cary Elwes pops up briefly as a Truman Capote-esque book critic, who snarks waspishly at Shaw and Lucy during one of the early bookstore appearances. Veronica Ferres has an equally fleeting role as Drew Davis, a popular writer that Lucy dreams of adding to Stanbridge’s otherwise paltry stable.
Grieco’s core premise is as old as the hills, and it’s reasonable to expect the story arc to move in predictable directions. It does … but only to a degree. Grieco confounds expectations in the third act, and the final scene is a really nice little twist.
Caine isn’t anywhere near finished — he has three upcoming films in the hopper, as these words are typed — and he never fails to entertain. Best Sellers may be conventional material, but he and Plaza make it delectable.
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