Time marches on, but not everyone does. Some people seem to reside in the past, even if it’s true that a disproportionate number of them are characters in arty novels and independent films. Kevin Kline essays one such character in this self-consciously quirky comedy from Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, the husband-wife duo that made the splendorous American Splendor and the dire Nanny Diaries. Like Nanny Diaries, this is another adaptation of a novel (by Jonathan Ames) that uses a naive main character as a lens into a strange subculture. Kline plays a teacher/playwright whose “opus” was “stolen by a Swiss hunchback,” whose politics are “to the right of the pope,” and whose social life revolves around his part-time employment as an escort for elderly, wealthy women.
The teacher is called is Henry Harrison, which may be a nod to Henry Higgins, who in Pygmalion/My Fair Lady educates Eliza Doolittle in the ways of society. That this sort of society barely exists anymore does not deter Henry from educating his young roommate, Louis (Paul Dano), in its ways. This works because Louis too imagines himself inhabiting an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Like The Royal Tennenbaums, the movie exudes a certain deliberately anachronistic feel. The world it portrays is so quaint that one can apparently get fired as a prep-school professor for merely pretending to try on a bra, as Louis does before heading to Manhattan. A movie marquee places the time as 2008, but one of the few reminders that the film is set in recent days is a single call received on a cell phone. Louis gets a job at a literary magazine that is actually flourishing. His boss, miraculously, has no computer on his desk. Harrison writes on a typewriter.
This is one of those movies that doesn’t really make you laugh but aims to keep you amused via the constant oddness of its main character, a would-be aristocrat who nonetheless can barely make ends meet, drives a clunker, and thinks himself clever for mastering the art of peeing in the street without being seen. Nor can he seem to avoid disagreements, petty and large, with ex-roommates, colleagues, and the women he escorts. In case Henry isn’t odd enough, he’s got a downstairs neighbor who looks like a homeless man but talks like a lady.
Henry is a fine role for Kline, no doubt his most eccentric since winning an Oscar for A Fish Called Wanda. Dano, of There Will Be Blood, has the mild-mannered, eager-to-please thing down. Even Katie Holmes, playing Louis’s coworker, was a surprise; her character doesn’t simply function as a love interest for Louis. But there is just too much self-conscious weirdness here for the movie to sustain the weight of its collective pretensions. You can probably get away with one character as eccentric as Kline’s, but too many schnooks spoil the froth, and that is the case here. Henry is supposed to be both a tragic hero and a figure of fun, but borders on being tedious.
IMDB link
viewed 8/17/10 at Ritz 5 (PFS screening) and reviewed 9/6/10 (based on previous notes)
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