Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
9/8/09
You're
either wired for sales or you're not. For me, for instance, the thought
of walking up to perfect strangers and trying to talk them into buying
something is kinda like asking me to walk into a hospital and perform open
heart surgery. It's always seemed to me that the sales personality
is kinda like the stand-up comedian personality, just a little too extroverted
to not be covering for something, and that goes double for car salesmen.
As such, they're perfect fodder for the latest Adam McKay/Will Ferrell-produced
comedy. The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard has great fun
with the dark underbelly of car sales, spun with the Tall Tale format popularized
by the duo's Anchorman and Talladega Nights. Ferrell
settles for a supporting role, turning the lead over to Jeremy Piven, whose
dishonest edge makes him born to play mercenary liquidator Don “The Goods”
Ready. It's a surly, drunken, no-holds-barred kinda movie that happens
to be pretty delightful in its' own bitter way.
These
are tough times at Selleck Motors. With a sales staff that hovers
between incompetent and bizarre and the bank looking for foreclose, Ben
Selleck (James Brolin) has only one choice: call in a mercenary.
And not just any mercenary, but Don “The Goods” Ready (Jeremy Piven), who
leads an eclectic crew of salesmen who can move anything to anybody.
Brent Gage (David Koechner), Jibby Newsome (Ving Rhames) and Babs Merrick
(Kathryn Hahn) have been on the road with Don for over a year since the
death of their teammate McDermott (Will Ferrell) in a bizarre accident
nobody wants to talk about. Pushing cars at Selleck Motors over the
4th of July weekend should be a snap, but Don's even more desperate than
usual for a life-changing epiphany and latches onto Ben's daughter Ivy
(Jordana Spiro) and the notion that one of Ben's salesmen (Jonathan Sadowski)
is his son. Throw in the fact that if Ben loses the lot, it'll go
to Ivy's fiance Paxton Harding (Ed Helms) and his “Man Band” Big Ups that
once opened for O-Town, and it's not just sales anymore. For Don
Ready, this 4th of July is war.
It's
hard for me to use the word “offensive” to describe The Goods because
it's got such an aggressively backslappy determination to mock EVERYTHING
that falls within its' sights. But if you are someone disinclined
to cut that kind of slack, be warned: this is a movie that's not
afraid to run a subplot about Babs trying to seduce Ben's son Peter (Rob
Riggle), who may appear to be 30, but is actually only 10 (pesky glandular
condition!). Writers Andy Stock & Rick Stempson find the quiet
desperation of the middle-aged to be pretty damn hilarious, and the characters
are all looking frantically for some kind of connection to shake up their
manic, Type A lives. But while most movies would reward or sentimentalize
those quests, The Goods stands back and laughs understandingly.
It's not that we're supposed to find these people to be fools, but instead
that we're supposed to see insane extremes of ourselves in them.
Generally speaking, the harder your road has been, the more likely you
are to connect with the second level here: it's probably the only
movie I've ever seen that includes crawls over the end credits to assure
you that things didn't work out, not that you won't see that coming.
But
even if you're looking past the movie's warped humanism, there are still
a lot of laughs to be had. Don Ready is very much a Legend of Nothing
in the McKay/Ferrell vein, such a slick talker he's not only able to sell
the stewardess on his flight that he should be allowed to smoke, but persuades
the whole plane to join him in an in-flight orgy. Flashbacks show
that long before he was the man who heralded his arrival with business
cards that read “I move cars, motherf***er”, he cut playground deals with
a card proclaiming “I move toys, motherf***er”. And even when his
inspirational speeches prove TOO good, as when one linking the 4th of July
sale to Pearl Harbor ends up getting a Korean salesman (Ken Jeong) jumped
an beaten, he can just talk his way out of that too. Piven is just
perfect in the role, exuding oily, contemptuous charm while at the same
time selling us Don's silly desperation to find love and a long-lost son
on the Selleck Motors lot.
And
the movie is bursting at the seams with great supporting characters.
Starting with Don's crew: Brent is the kind of hyper-confident wingman
Koechner excels at, while Jibby's laid-back strangeness gives Rhames a
nice chance to remind us that he's a very funny guy. And then there's
Babs, nobody lives harder or sells harder, but what makes Hahn's performance
so funny is that her desperation isn't nearly so quiet as her co-workers.
Yeah, yeah, I know, playing pedophilia for laughs is a dicey proposition,
but it's her very refusal to give in to the fact that Peter isn't as old
as he looks (not to mention the fact that anyone is actually attracted
to a man babbling about Transformers and yelling “Stranger danger!” at
the drop of a hat) that makes it a hoot.
Brolin
leads a reliable group of comics at the dealership with that funny note
of clueless statesmanship he's gotten so good at. And while we're
getting cheap laughs out of politically incorrect material, his obsessive
flirting with Brent, and Koechner's extreme displeasure with same, is very
well played. Veteran Charles Napier is a real scene-stealer as Dick
Lewiston, a hard-core holdover from “the time when it was OK to call coloreds
'coloreds'.” whose every word drips with senile rage. Jeong and Tony
Hale do a nice job with their own in-over-their-head salesmen, and Sadowski
plays a great straight man to Don's delusions of parenthood. Helms
is appropriately hissable as the anti-Don, even if Big Ups is never quite
the comic goldmine the movie thinks it is. And it's fun to see Alan
Thicke as his delusionally supportive Dad.
Chapelle's
Show vet Neal Brennan makes his feature directorial debut with supreme
confidence. Most movies like this let their tone drift all over the
map grasping for laughs everywhere they can get them, but The Goods
picks a worldview and sticks to it, and that's saying something.
I also highly recommend that you stick around to witness one of the strangest
credit cookies I've ever seen, a toe-tapping song built by running the
same clip from the movie over and over again until it sounds like Piven
and Spiro are singing. Weird, but I have to admit I was humming it
for a day or so afterwards.
The
Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard made me laugh quite a bit, and I
highly recommend it to anyone who shares its' raunchy, embittered sense
of humor. It's the kind of movie where even the angels who return
as the late McDermott's choir offer nothing but hatred and derision for
poor Don, but you've got to love the way he doesn't let any of that get
in the way of his self-imposed happy ending. After all, a good salesman
can't let a little thing like life get in the way of closing his deal. |
