Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
9/4/08
Dying, they say, is easy,
while comedy is very, very hard. I can barely imagine the self confidence
it must take to commit to a really out-there comic performance on a soundstage
with no audience feedback. It's no wonder many comedies shoot movies
upon movies worth of footage and then edit it into its' final version only
after sampling the bits and pieces before test audiences: it must
be nerve-wracking! So, it can be easy to look at a comedy that's
not working and wonder if the participants had any idea it was going badly
on the set. Hamlet 2, the painfully self-amused new film festival
darling from co-writer/director Andrew Fleming, asks the opposite question.
With seemingly every actor giving a different kind of comic performance,
most of them bad, how could anyone have thought it was going well?
The movie does have its' moments, but surprisingly few of them are funny.
I look at all those rave reviews from Sundance and keep telling myself
“There's nothing more subjective than comedy.” And it doesn't hurt
if one of a movie's few good characters is a critic.
Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan)
dreamed of being an actor. Alas, he was very, very bad at it.
So he went “where dreams go to die”, Tucson, AZ, where he has become a
very, very bad drama teacher. His tri-annual theatrical stagings
of popular Hollywood films (the latest: Erin Brockovich) seem
to be performed entirely by the only two members of his drama class, Rand
Posin (Skylar Austin) and Epiphany Sellars (Phoebe Strole), and are roundly
savaged by the school paper's unaccountably tiny theater critic (Shea Pepe,
a hoot in his few scenes). With belt tightening forcing about a dozen
new Hispanic students into his class after their preferred activities are
canceled, Principal Rocker (Marshall Bell) informs Dana of the inevitable:
this will be the final semester for the drama program. How can he
turn things around, inspiring his new students from the wrong side of the
tracks while winning community support to save the theater program?
It'll take a bold, original show, an idea Dana's been kicking around his
head for years: "Hamlet 2"! Surprisingly, once Tuscon gets
wind of a show featuring songs like “Raped in the Face” and “Rock Me, Sexy
Jesus,” pressure mounts to shut it down. Dana will need the help
of crusading ACLU lawyer Cricket Feldstein (Amy Pohler) to have any hope
of sharing "Hamlet 2" with the world.
Hamlet 2 has a lot
of problems, but what's on the page could probably have been turned into
a entertaining little comedy with a consistent directorial approach and
a cast that was all on the same page. Alas, H2's cast could
easily have all done their parts in front of green screens and been edited
together, and very few of the comic performances even stand up on their
own. The biggest blame has to go to the man in front: Coogan
is usually a reliably agreeable presence, but here he's out walking a tightrope
he seems to fall from in each and every scene. It's as though he
tried to envision the worst performance Martin Short never gave and then
went all out to summon it. Not only is his flailing idiocy as Dana
unfunny, but it cuts against the grain of the role. It might be funny
if he acted this way but seemed to be a brilliant artist or if he actually
resembled the inspirational movie teachers he admires on the outside only
to be a babbling moron at his heart, but to be both a stumbling idiot and
a babbling moron at the same time is fatally unfunny. I knew the
movie was in trouble when it opened with clips of him doing commercials
and guest-starring on Xena: Warrior Princess, and I couldn't
for a moment imagine that they were real clips. Coogan's not acting
in a satire, he's doing that very last sketch on Saturday Night Live
that makes you desperately wish the show was only an hour long.
But his is only the beginning
of the comic misfires. Catherine Keener plays his bitter shrew of
a wife as though this was Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?
Her every moment on screen is painfully harsh and she's not even in the
same universe as the man standing to her right. Or her left:
David Arquette plays Gary, the roommate the Marschzs are forced to take
on to make ends meet. Gary is a fun idea for a character: the
dullest man alive, he's unable to utter a single sentence that's not totally
banal, but Arquette plays him totally straight and is, in fact, nothing
but dull. Epiphany is pretty much every White Girl Theater Student
cliché known to man rolled into one, right down to the way she adopts
the Hispanic kids' mannerisms and lingo in the end, but Strole actually
makes a more convincing Erin Brockovich than Epiphany. She too has
a way of letting the character just lay there like she's in a bad SNL
sketch.
Ironic then that the movie's
best comic performance comes from an SNL alum, Poehler, whose comic
timing is so whip-sharp it puts the rest of the cast to literal shame.
In the movie's most buzzed-about role, Elisabeth Shue has fun as “herself”,
having retired from acting to become a nurse, but ever so slowly finding
herself pulled back toward the demon showbiz by Dana's production.
Like a lot of the movie, the “Elisabeth Shue” role is the kind of thing
that should really go over the top and be filled with hysterical moments
and details, but it's mostly content to just be a funny idea for a funny
character. At least it's well played.
Hamlet 2's ads trumpet
co-writer Pam Brady's credits as co-writer of South Park: Bigger,
Longer & Uncut and Team America: World Police, but
while the script has a dusting of scandal and controversy (we're told Hilary
Clinton and Dick Cheney, among others, are "H2" characters, though we never
see them), it's never as outrageous or scandalous as it needs to be to
get real laughs. Also problematic is that this is one of those movies
where the white characters could well be wearing whiteface with their shameless
over-the-top mugging, but the thought of making the Hispanic kids anything
but cool sends chills down the filmmakers' spines.
A movie like this will tend
to rise or fall on the production the characters are mounting, and while
I must admit that the first hour is far too painful to even consider recommending
Hamlet 2 on the basis of "Hamlet 2", the play does turn out to be
quite good. Again, it's not as funny as it wishes it was, and the
big “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus” number expects that title (blatantly sung to
the tune of “Little Shop of Horrors” to boot) to get an entire song's worth
of laughs, the same as mentioning the Tucson Gay Men's Chorus and then
giving them nothing to do but sing. But I was most frustrated by
Coogan's buffoonish performance when I saw where the movie is actually
headed. We're to laugh the whole time when he suggests that "Hamlet
2" is a meditation on his relationship with his father and shoots back
that “Everybody deserves a second chance!” when people mock his device
of using a time machine to save Shakespeare's doomed characters.
But lo and behold, "H2"'s story really does click on these levels, and
the notion of Jesus giving Hamlet his time machine to go back and correct
the mistakes he made has a bizarrely post-modern resonance. Joseph
Julian Soria makes a fine Hamlet 2, even when dueling Laertes with lightsabers.
I wished the movie had been worthy of its' own play.
But Hamlet 2 is, for
most of its' running time, painfully unfunny and satirically toothless.
The cast and crew weren't afraid to go for broke, and in the process, they
broke what could have been a mildly entertaining comedy. But the
kid playing the critic is really funny, and apparently that goes a long
way in some circles. |
