The Extra Man (**1/2)

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)

The Astronaut Farmer (**3/4)

? Billy Bob Thornton plays one of his least eccentric eccentrics, a family man and former NASA employee who happens to have obsessively pursued his dream of building his own rocket. This is the fourth film from Mark and Michael Polish (Twin Falls Idaho, Jackpot, Northfork), but, perhaps due to its larger budget, jettisons the austere approach of their earlier work while maintaining the American heartland setting.
+ This is the very definition of the feel-good movie, crossing the inspirational sports movie genre with a family story and makes it about getting into space rather than getting to the major leagues or winning a race. (It’s not a true story, though.) Virginia Madsen and Bruce Dern play the wife and father characters. The would-be astronaut can be seen as a selfish character, but he also cares about his family, even as he threatens to bankrupt them. They’re all sort of nice to be around, and their indulgence of Dad’s weird hobby rings true. There’s a little bit of humor (including the ubiquitous Jay Leno cameo), a few FAA and NASA nogoodniks, and a some life-in-a-small-town stuff, but none of the story elements overwhelms the others. Some nice location shooting finds New Mexico substituting for Texas.
- Notwithstanding the indie credibility of the Polish Brothers, the rocket plot’s trajectory is only a little different than you’ll expect it to be. I suppose October Sky would be the other movie about rural folks headed for space, but the better comparison would be last year’s underappreciated The World’s Fastest Indian, which was also about an eccentric who liked to tinker. I’d give an edge to October Sky because it was grittier and to Indian because the Anthony Hopkins character was so endearingly odd and the story a little more elliptical.
= *** If you’ve enjoyed inspirational sports movies but have gotten tired of the sports part, this’ll be a very easy movie to like.

IMDB link

reviewed 2/23/07

The World’s Fastest Indian (***1/4)

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Anthony Hopkins perfectly plays Burt Munro, a New Zealand eccentric who dreamed of racing his jury-rigged 1920 motorbike on the salt flats of Utah.

The title refers to the forty-year-old motorbike New Zealand crank Burt Munro tinkers with in his garage, not to the crank himself, who’s played by Anthony Hopkins. Munro was a real guy who, four decades ago, lived out his dream of going to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah to attempt a speed record on his fragile-looking vehicle. This is another underdog sports story, but the movie puts the brakes on the cliché moments and concentrates on the journey to possible victory. Along the way we get to see some now-faded bits of Americana, like the old Burma Shave signs. Hopkins plays the appealingly eccentric Munro perfectly. Already in his sixties when he attempted his records, Munro/Hopkins looks as frail as his jury-rigged little bike. I knew the story and I still kept worrying he’d crash the bloody thing. Written and directed by Roger Donaldson (The Recruit), The World’s Fastest Indian is a sometimes-funny visual memoir as charming as its subject seems to have been.

IMDb link

posted 9/17/13