Sidelined: MASCOTS

Christopher Guest’s Mascots introduces us to plucky weirdos driven to get in big foam costumes and wiggle around to delight and excite a crowd. There’s a husband/wife team (Zach Woods and Sarah Baker) who play a turtle and an octopus for a low-rent baseball team, a chipper Brit hedgehog for a soccer team (Tom Bennett), a loopy arts’ college armadillo (Parker Posey), a football teams’ oversized plumber (Christopher Moynihan), and a grouchy Irishman (Chris O’Dowd) who dresses as a giant fist for hockey games. They’re all driven to find success, powering forward with boundless positivity and love of the game in the pursuit of a silly dream: the grand prize at an annual mascot convention. If this sounds like it’s falling into Guest’s formula, you’re correct. It’s another of his mockumentaries involving an affectionately teased subculture. But unlike his great earlier comedies and their targets, Waiting for Guffman’s community theater, Best in Show’s dog competition, and A Might Wind’s folk music revival, Mascots lacks crucial specificity. Trying too hard to whip up eccentricities, it’s a flat, dull attempt at resuscitating a form that’s past its sell-by date.

Superficially, Mascots has everything that made earlier Christopher Guest movies great. It has the subculture. It has the large ensemble of funny people, including many of the performers who populated Guest’s earlier works and some welcome additions. (Present and accounted for are Jennifer Coolidge, John Michael Higgins, Michael Hitchcock, Fred Willard, Bob Balaban, Jane Lynch, Ed Begley, Jr., and others.) It has the bright, flat mockumentary style allowing for the humor to loosely arrive at tossed-off lines. It’s has the casually ridiculous spoken with only a hint of bemusement and straight-faced silliness unfolding for an unemphatic camera. It’s agreeable. But, wow, is it not funny. Maybe it rises to the level of gently amusing from time to time, and the whole picture never quite tanks into something totally contemptible, but that’s certainly a far cry from the best Guest can do. This is his first movie in a decade, and the problem is partly what happened to the comedy landscape while he was away.

Firstly, the mainstream mockumentary style was more refreshing and novel when he took the form from the classic This is Spinal Tap, in which he co-starred, and applied it to his own silly trilogy. With Guffman and the rest, there was the spark of invention in seeing big, funny ensembles improvise their way to hilarious, endlessly quotable dialogue in scenes assembled with verite deadpan and plot pushed along by interviews with the characters. Now, after two versions of The Office, Parks & Rec, Modern Family, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and so on and so on, the style has been wrung out. Add to it Mascot’s half-heartedness with which it deploys the gimmick – with many scenes including cuts to impossible camera angles – and it just feels tired. Besides, at least those other mockumentaries were plausibly exaggerated looks at actual groups. The extrapolated and invented mascots and their rivalries and competitions here simply isn’t a culture with much connection to the real world. It’s not a parody of a real group of people; it’s simply goofing around based on a sliver of recognizable interest. (And if you think the plot is overfamiliar diminishing returns, wait’ll you see how Guest revives his memorable Corky St. Clair to flatlining results.)

Secondly, the improv style has also come to dominate the comedy film scene. From the Apatow productions – which expand their runtimes with long, loose scenes of characters cracking each other up – to every comedy that pauses its action for punchline roulettes in which the cast takes turns throwing out insults. (These have long stopped seeming like scenes and are more a matter of spitting a bunch of possible jokes and hoping one lands hard enough to excuse the rest. It’s coverage, not choices.) The shaggy scenes in which talented people find their way to a naturally funny bantering chemistry is no longer unfamiliar territory. And when it’s handled so carelessly as it is with Mascots it just feels sad. As a big fan of his earlier work, seeing Guest’s formula returning in such a diminished state is dispiriting. Sure, there are fleeting moments of good humor – like a hotel with a “John Wayne suite” downgrading a disappointed guest to the “Slim Pickens” – but there’s otherwise a desperation in scenes devoid of interest and missing laughs. I smiled a few times, chuckled a few more, but was otherwise thoroughly bummed out by how pale an echo of old favorites it is. Compared to other modern comedies, at least it’s not unendurable or ugly. It’s watchable. But the dead air is deafening.

Dull Nightlife: CAFÉ SOCIETY

Late period Woody Allen is certainly filmmaking that’ll charm those already predisposed to finding comfort in his rhythms and style – the unwavering font, the American songbook score, the familiar character types, the thematic concerns of a midcentury pop philosopher – and deter those who’ve tired of his tricks (or his personal life). He can still provide a surprise now and then – last year’s Irrational Man was a (probably) self-aware curdling of his tropes; 2011’s Midnight in Paris had lovely French time-travel romanticism – but you mostly know what you’re going to get. Well, you make a new movie a year for over four decades and see how many new topics and techniques you can come up with. So it’s no surprise Café Society, this year’s Allen feature, finds him noodling around with ideas he’s used better before. There are unrequited romantic connections, affairs, insecurities, intellectual posturing, an ambitious and sensitive young Jewish man and his family, and the wistful melancholy of nostalgia. It’s not Allen’s best representation of any of the above, lightly skipping across the surface of places where his writing has other times deepened.

One of his period pieces, it’s told in a brightly artificial simulacrum of New York and Los Angeles of the late 1930s, the better to keep the jazz flowing on the soundtrack and the arch reproduction pseudo-literary stuffiness of the dialogue era-appropriate. Jesse Eisenberg stars as a squirrely young New Yorker who on a whim moves to Hollywood in hopes his uncle (Steve Carell), a high-powered agent, will find him a job in the industry. His mother (Jeannie Berlin) calls ahead and tells her brother to help, but the agent brushes her off. He’s too busy to look after his nephew, but after weeks of waiting relents and puts the eager young man to work running errands. This gets him working closely with a sweet, smart assistant (Kristen Stewart) with whom there’s instant infatuation. Too bad, then, that she has a mysterious unseen boyfriend, a married man whose identity is eventually revealed to be a character we’ve already met. Standard setup, the plot and dialogue are merely going through the motions, but there are some small glimmers of life amidst the artifice.

The early, breezy passages of the movie are a mild warmed-over farce, with characters jostling for attention and obscuring truths. It has low-key charms, but the cast remains posed and situated in the precise, and precisely too-perfect phony, period detail. It looks not like events lived, or situations performed, but games of make-believe staged for our benefit. It’s not a cast; it’s people in costumes. Still, the actors do what they can. Stewart, who unfailingly brings a real sense of grounded presence to the screen, is the highlight. She has a scene where she has to keep feelings hidden while reacting in shock and pain as one lover unknowingly recounts a slight the other shared in secret. The emotion is plain on her face in a twitch of the eyes and a slight shift of the jaw, and yet it is entirely believable that her scene partner wouldn’t notice. A close second for most valuable player is Berlin, grounding a stereotypical Jewish mother role with lived-in conviction. Eisenberg, for his part, plays the Allen-impersonation trap, stammering and twitching, stumbling through wordy lines. And Carell puffs out his chest for a shallow impersonation of an early-Hollywood powerbroker type.

As the film progresses Allen balloons the small, simple, obvious premise into something approaching a sprawling semi-comic family drama. We end up following Eisenberg’s character for several years past the end of the farce, through its fallout and into what’s surely at least a decade of time passing. Threaded throughout are cutaways to Corey Stoll as his two-bit gangster brother who opens a café (and draws in a bunch of high society) while staying a step ahead of the law. (That many of these cutaways are quick gags about gruesome murders is an odd hitch in the otherwise pleasant, even-keel tone.) Other people floating through the supporting cast include a glamorous divorcee (Blake Lively), and a sharply dressed bicoastal power couple (Parker Posey and Paul Schneider). There’s some fun in the mostly intelligent casting, though not every character crackles with the right interest, and not every actor is up to delivering or improving upon what they’re given. Better small pleasures are in the humble glowing cinematography from the legendary Vittorio Storaro (of such beautifully photographed films as The Last Emperor and Apocalypse Now), who captures warm sunny contrasts and, in one striking shot, a luminous, dusky, full-color angle on a bridge that recalls Manhattan’s famous shot.

With a pretty surface exploration of a small variety of relationships, it slowly becomes a melancholy movie about missed connections, about people who’d rather live in denial than face up to the ways they’ve hurt others. And even then the denial slips, leaving them contemplating their choices with regret. That’s a great flicker of life, but embedded in half-thought and underwritten scenes which often seem to grasp for obvious lines and hanging lampshades on thematic points already plainly visible above the subtext. For instance, a character actually trots out the old “an unexamined life…” saying unironically, before putting a spin at the end in a hacking punchline. Like so many of Allen’s lesser works, it’s underwritten. A great performer with a reasonably complicated part like Stewart or Berlin can be lively, dry, funny, and convincing, but smaller roles and lesser actors flounder as the plot and mood slowly peter out. Scene after scene sits flat and tired, jolted occasionally with the sparks of the better movie it could’ve been with another draft or two.

Crimes and Misbehaviors: IRRATIONAL MAN

Once you open the door to a little lie, you live in a world full of reasons to lie. At least that’s a philosophical perspective a depressed professor tries to explain early in Irrational Man, Woody Allen’s latest film. The academic doesn’t really believe it, and that’s not just because he disagrees professionally. He’s not sure he believes in anything at all, having a reached a point of real and deep psychological despair some point before arriving on campus to start his new teaching position during a sunny summer term. At the film’s core is this man’s search for meaning, a solution for his melancholy impotence, creative and otherwise. He finds it not in drinking or flirting with a pretty student, though they’re sickly good stopgaps, but by deciding suddenly and forcefully to commit a perfect crime. He thinks he's smart enough to get away with murder. Once he’s allowed himself to think about it, he’s in a world full of reasons to transgress.

This is hardly the first film from Woody Allen to consider existential crises, the cruelty of mankind, and the cold possibility of evil going unpunished. (See: Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Match Point, and so on.) But in the breezy drama he makes of it this time sits one of its bitterest expressions. Those interested in biographical criticism will surely find it noteworthy to point out that Allen made this film after renewed scrutiny on his personal life and alleged crimes. Irrational Man makes its professor a source of scorn and gossip, who clings to his sense of self-righteous self-justification, and who ultimately must pay for his hubris. If this is to be read as an expression of Allen, it’s a self-loathing statement. But it’s not a poisoned or stunted film. No, he’s up to his usual lively artifice.

Like so much of his recent output, the film plays like a draft, another sketch of ideas and themes he’s obsessively working over, varying the tone and plot, but flowing from a consistent voice. Here he is once more with the American songbook score, white Windsor font credits, and characters cloaked in the brisk patter of stuffy East Coast midcentury pseudo-intellectuals that maybe only ever really existed in this precise manner in the world of Woody Allen movies. Indeed, here the characters are signifiers in an intellectual exercise, but what a fascinating, dryly nasty little work this is. There’s an extra sting to thinly imagined characters as an expert cast enlivens arch wordiness and cinematographer Darius Khondji (in his fourth collaboration with Allen) creates bright tableaus pinning them in. The result is like a frustrated English major turned half-hearted gag writer punched up a minor forgotten Hitchcock concept.

What lets the picture breathe is ultimately the cold jazzy syncopation of dueling narrators, puncturing the depressed professor’s murderous ideas with the naïve beaming lights of a student. What starts as a typical vaguely queasy older man/younger woman relationship is played for its inappropriateness, and is made to seem wrong as a factor in the plot. We meet the man (Joaquin Phoenix, draining potential ticks from the dialogue with a flattened affect) as he arrives on campus just about ready to kill himself. The woman (Emma Stone, as cheerful as ever) is in his class, and responds eagerly to his praise. When they first embrace, Khondji finds them in the reflection of a funhouse mirror. There’s no denying the warped relationship now, especially as the clearly troubled man soon begins secret murder planning and everyone around the woman – her boyfriend (Jamie Blackley), parents (Betsy Aidem and Ethan Phillips), and chemistry teacher (Parker Posey) – advises her to keep her distance.

A key image is the film’s most striking shot. (It may very well be among the best shots in Allen’s career.) Phoenix stands at the end of a pier, the setting sun silhouetting him, reflecting off the water in a way that ripples his form. He looks like a ghostly shadow lurking in the middle of a picturesque landscape. He’s a figure unknowable, and as Stone questions how much she really understands about him, he grows all the more unspeakably creepy. By allowing us access to both character’s thoughts, we’re allowed full knowledge neither have. Their conflict, present even when neither is aware, gains an interesting friction. They arrive at logical conclusions for their situations, the film snapping shut with a clanging moral, neatly deployed. Philosophy in action, or philosophy inaction, leads them to unsettled conclusions, the sort of world-weary worldview of an old man who once thought his intellectual posturing could beat back despair but isn’t so sure anymore. Here’s a film that says the only rational philosophy is one that sees those who damage others fall to dooms of their own making.