Kenny (***1/4)

If you know the word mockumentary, you probably associate it with the films of Christopher Guest, of Best in Show/A Mighty Wind fame, or maybe Borat, or the Woody Allen film Zelig. But the one I probably would most be able to believe was a about a real person would be this Aussie film by brothers Clayton and Shane Jacobson. Clayton is the credited director, while Shane gives an utterly natural performance as the title character, a plumber who leads a crew of port-a-potty installers in the Melbourne area. You probably never thought about portable toilets, but Kenny thinks about them all the time. For example, when determining how many toilets you need for a particular event, it’s not enough to just know the number of people. You need to know whether food’s being served, and in particular whether there will be curry, which can significantly impact the piss-and-shit ratio.

Yeah, there’s some literal toilet humor here, but not the obvious (i.e., no fart jokes). For a movie about portable toilets, it’s much less crude than Borat—wisely, the Jacobsons avoid showing actual human waste, even if its presence is frequently implied. Most of the laughs come from the way Kenny speaks, whether it’s about a smell that will “outlast religion” or something “as silly as a bum full of Smarties.” (The version I saw had subtitles, which definitely helped between the Aussie accent and Kenny’s unusual turns of phrase.)

With Guest’s semi-improvised comedies, I sometimes have the feeling that the dialogue is forced. But here, I never once felt like Kenny/Jacobson was trying to be funny. The character may be unusually fascinated by plumbing, but he’s not at all a buffoon, and proves quite likeable. If anything may put people off, other than Kenny’s job, it’s that there is not really an overall plot. Whereas Borat is a travelogue, and Guest’s movies are mostly built around particular events like a dog show or a TV concert, Kenny is more like a year in the life of its main character, and so is episodic. Still, the festival audience I saw it with clearly found it very funny. In Kenny’s relationships with his father and with a woman he meets on a trip to America, it’s even a little bit touching. Fair dinkum, as the Aussies say.

IMDB link

viewed 4/14/08; reviewed 4/19/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival