The Comedian: Can't work the crowd

The Comedian (2016) • View trailer 
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.

When Jackie (Robert De Niro) is invited to his niece's wedding, he impulsively asks new
friend Harmony (Leslie Mann) to tag along, little anticipating her questionable taste in
attire. Worse yet, he fails to foresee that his doting niece will expect him to "say a few
words" ... never a good idea for Jackie, in front of a conservative crowd.

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).

While We're Young: Sly social commentary

While We're Young (2014) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity
By Derrick Bang

Getting older is difficult enough, in terms of physical and emotional challenges, without having to worry about the need to remain “relevant.”

In the aftermath of a truly silly consciousness-raising experience, Josh (Ben Stiller) and
Cornelia (Naomi Watts) attempt to make sense of the previous evening, to determine
whether any useful insight might have been achieved. Sadly, they've a ways to go before
any genuinely helpful epiphanies.

Perversely, though, that issue has become more challenging in our modern world, with cultural and technological imperatives changing not by the decade, not even by the year, but at times — seemingly — by the month. More than ever before, it feels like only agile young minds have a hope of keeping up.

But is “keeping up” really that important?

Intellectual obsolescence is the core issue of Noah Baumbach’s newest character study, but the writer/director actually has much more on his mind. Part comedy, part drama and all biting social commentary, While We’re Young is a perceptive take on 21st century fortysomethings who worry that life is passing them by ... or, worse yet, long ago left town on the last bus.

Mid-life crises are nothing new, of course; every generation crosses this more-or-less halfway point with varying degrees of the same angst. But Hollywood didn’t really discover the genre until 1955’s The Seven Year Itch, and most of the topic’s classics are more recent: 1973’s Save the Tiger, 1979’s Manhattan, 1999’s American Beauty and 2004’s Sideways come quickly to mind.

While We’re Young definitely belongs in their company. Baumbach has an unerring ear for troubled interpersonal dynamics, dating back to his Oscar-nominated script for 2005’s The Squid and the Whale. That said, some of his subsequent films — however insightful — spent too much time with unpalatable or downright mean-spirited characters; it’s difficult to embrace any message when delivered by, say, the misanthropic title character in Greenberg.

But Baumbach’s approach has been gentler of late, starting with the forlorn misfit played so winningly by Greta Gerwig, in 2012’s Frances Ha. Maybe it’s because Baumbach is gaining maturity not merely as a filmmaker, but also as a person; it can’t be accidental that he’s the same age as his protagonists in While We’re Young, definitely his kindest — and therefore more approachable — film to date.

We meet Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts) as they nervously try to interact with a newborn: not theirs, as we quickly discover, but the first child of best friends Fletcher and Marina (Adam Horovitz and Maria Dizzia). As displayed so expressively by Watts — Cornelia tries, but doesn’t quite succeed, to hide her agitation — this moment is a crisis, and not merely because it revives painful memories of their own failed attempts to have children.

No, it’s a crossroads. Just as marriage leaves still-single friends feeling isolated, new parents with kids instantaneously join yet another social clique that simply doesn’t allow for childless members ... no matter how polite the lip-service.

Just like that, Josh and Cornelia feel left out.