In a World… (**1/4)

If the phrase in the title is familiar, it might be as the start of many a movie trailer narrated by Don LaFontaine. As in, In a world where for decades men have dominated the field of voice-over work, one woman dares to dream that she can break into the field. Only one man can stop her. Her father. Lake Bell, best known for her role on Boston Legal, plays Carol, aspiring voice actor. She’s also the writer and director. Fred Melamed, a character actor who’s actually done voice-over work, is the father, Sam Sotto. Sotto, said to be second only to the late Mr. LaFontaine, is happy for his daughter’s modest success as a voice coach. (In the opening bit, she’s teaching Eva Longoria how to do a cockney accent.) But he’s less encouraging about her efforts to move in on his turf.

This is certainly a novel topic for a comedy, but the movie feels entirely composed of the kinds of scenes seen in movie trailers; that is, the most exaggerated ones. For example, at the beginning of the movie, Sam tell Carol she needs to move out so his 30-years-younger girlfriend can move in. There’s no rush, he says, can you leave tonight? “In a week” might have been a bit funny. But the no rush/tonight combination just seemed exaggerated and therefore false. In another scene, Carol’s brother-in-law (Rob Corddry) is lying to his wife about preparing dinner. Since he is holding a sandwich, he tells her, stumblingly, that he is making a “sandwich bar.” Would any real person, even a bad liar, say this? And, if so, would the other person then not say, “A what?” Much of the movie is like this. For a movie about subtleties in tone of voice, Bell is remarkably unwilling to let subtleties in tone (or gesture) convey emotions like uncertainty and shyness. Instead, the characters typically mumble and go on too long in a highly artificial way, as one might see in sitcoms.

The funniest parts of the movie are those in which Bell does imitations of other voices as well as the silly movie trailer that serves as a pretty good parody of Hunger Games-style blockbusters. I wish there’d been more of that, as well as more about what it might be like to be a voice actor. (For the most part, I never felt that I was actually seeing that world.) The non-comedic parts, like Carol’s relationship with her older sister, are also okay, and somewhere Bell is trying to make a point about Hollywood and sexism. But most of the time I could not forget that I was watching a movie.

IMDb link

viewed 8/22/13 7:50 at Ritz 5 and posted 8/22/13