Best Sellers: A whimsical read

Best Sellers (2021) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Unrated, with R-level profanity and vulgarity

Available via: Amazon Prime and other streaming services

By Derrick Bang

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.

 

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.

Caine’s entry is the lighter, frothier option, and director Lina Roessler’s arch handling of Best Sellers is right in his wheelhouse. Caine’s Harris Shaw could be Educating Rita’s Frank Bryant gone even further to crankier seed … much, much further.

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.