DVD Review: Cedar Rapids

Ed Helms’ leading-man debut is a funnier movie than The Hangover Part 2. It’s smarter, too.

Dying is easy and comedy is hard, as the famous adage goes, and by extension of that same logic it’s virtually impossible to get dark comedy right. The wreckage of failed attempts includes the best and the brightest artists of every comedy era, and not a few dramatic creators as well. Dark comedy – black comedy, gallows humor, cringe humor – carries its own additional pitfalls besides the usual minefield of problems awaiting its gentler cousin. And when dark comedy fails, too often the results land with a resounding thud, victims of creative overreach or slipshod understandings of tone.

Cedar Rapids, the often pitch-dark new effort from indie mainstay Miguel Arteta, walks its dark comedy tightrope constantly in danger of falling one way or the other. Though ultimately it succeeds, the suspense of waiting for it to collapse under its own ambitious weight suffuses virtually every scene. You almost come to care about the movie itself as much as its conventional story or oddball characters, wondering when at any second its whole artifice will come crashing down. It never does, thanks largely to its cast.

A star is brown: Helms

Small-town man-child Tim Lippe (Ed Helms) is sent by his boss (Stephen Root) at Brownstar Insurance to a regional convention after the agency’s alpha dog (Tom Lennon) dies of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Lippe isn’t ready for the responsibility, let alone the pressure of bringing home the convention’s “Two Diamond” award that the agency has secured several years in a row. But he goes anyway, propelled by his boss’ bullying. His wide-eyed, gawky enthusiasm, mixed with rustic suspicion for the dangers and promises of the titular “big city,” provide some of the film’s most unguarded moments.

The convention’s hotel (as uniformly cheerless, and cheerlessly uniform, as any of a million such places in America) and the people Lippe encounters there of course compel him to grow up emotionally and sexually. In particular, he finds himself drawn into the orbit of hard-partying, foul-mouthed policy “poacher” Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly), comparatively straight-laced Ronald Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) and the sultry, melancholy Joan (Anne Heche.) The quartet goof their way through the three-day conference while Tim readies his presentation to convention patriarch Orin Helgesson (Kurtwood Smith). Moral fortitude and honesty count for a lot in winning the “prestigious” Two Diamond trophy, and in assenting to his new friends’ temptations – including a fling with Joan – Lippe risks costing his company the award.

Artete works well within the small confines of the hotel, showing the confines of each blandly friendly space and how, especially given the inhospitable winter outside, even such slim diversions as hotel bar margaritas and overheated pools can offer a welcome distraction. It helps a lot that Phil Johnston’s script does right by its main character, shrewdly demonstrating Lippe’s fish out of water ups and downs: his new friends are a welcoming, non-judgmental bunch, a distant cry from the McJesus snobbery of his home town co-workers and neighbors – the same people, Lippe is decent enough to remember, that depend on him. Of course everything works out in the end, but not before plenty of debauchery and clean, if slightly mean-spirited, fun.

As a comic leading man, Helms’ strengths center on the same aw, shucks likability that’s served him more or less unwaveringly since his tenure on The Daily Show. Lippe is similar to The Office‘s Andy Bernard, more naive but less obtuse, with a greater vulnerability as a result. It’s tempting to thumbnail Lippe as Bernard freed of The Office‘s self-conscious repetition of character and story beats, but there’s more – a little more – to him than that. Helms makes him sympathetic but stops short of making him pitiable or charismatic.

He’s backed by, well, a dream supporting cast for this type of project. Reilly is a leading man trapped in the body of a character actor, and every one of his scenes tends to upset the tenuous balance Artete strikes between Lippe and his surroundings. In fact for much of the film’s first hour, the energy level rises palpably whenever Reilly’s motor- and foul-mouthed party animal comes onscreen. Comedies often rise or fall on the quotability of their dialogue; Reilly has most of the lines you’ll want to repeat to your friends.

The surprise performance, however, belongs to Heche as the otherwise content soccer mom who uses insurance conventions as a vacation from the staid security of her normal life. Heche is sexy, sad, and smart all at the same time, without resorting to vamping or overheated line readings to achieve said results. Her confession to Lippe about the normalcy of her life and the release of Cedar Rapids carries some of the film’s best writing, and her well-modulated delivery of the scene works as an oasis to the dark shenanigans displayed almost everywhere else. Heche’s career was swallowed years ago by the media’s provincial fascination with her sexuality; this performance earns her a shot at a larger comeback vehicle.

Making the most of smaller roles, Whitlock makes a charming straight man for the others, especially in a late scene in which he gets to spoof his role on The Wire. The prolific Root is hilarious as Lippe’s boss, and Smith brings the same imperial menace to Helgesson that he brought to all those years as That 70s Show‘s Red Foreman. Arrested Development fans may find themselves a little shocked to see Alia Shawkat, Maeby Funke herself, playing the hotel’s prostitute; the role allows her to say filthy things and look sultry, which for a career transition vehicle is possibly as good as it gets right now.

Cedar Rapids shouldn’t be confused for a great film, but it achieves its difficult ambitions while remaining entertaining, and it has the rare gift of growing in your memory after you leave the theatre. If its raunchy gags and sometimes awkward staging keep it from really developing into something approaching a classic modern dark comedy – Rushmore, to make a contemporary example, or Ruthless People - it’s trying for something riskier than the pot and potty humor that dominates too many modern “comedies” (Not least of which, obviously, The Hangover Part II.) It’s also, admittedly, refreshing to encounter a comedy that doesn’t bear Judd Apatow’s factory-pressed mixture of bittersweet nostalgia and stunted male growth.

Dying is easy, dark comedy is hardest, and ultimately Cedar Rapids is a damned funny movie with a cast full of people who should appear more than they do. Given a small release in the theatres last winter, it’s unmissable home video entertainment.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: The Killer Inside Me

Michael Winterbottom’s notorious thriller is troubled, frustrating, mystifying.

After more than two decades of filmmaking, Michael Winterbottom remains one of the most fascinating and yet frustrating directors working. His films are routinely energetic, ambitious, stuffed with memorable performances – actors routinely do their best work when participating in one of his projects – and his subject matter is never less than inventive and intriguing. So why aren’t his films, as complete works, better than they are?

The Killer Inside Me continues the recurrent trend that began with 1997′s Welcome To Sarajevo and continues through a half-dozen or so good-but-not-great films including 24 Hour Party People, The Claim, and Code 46. A great idea for a film, handsomely and adroitly cast, it never quite rises to its potential but instead languishes in unresolved issues and ideas that don’t quite work out to their best conclusions. It’s hobbled, too, by an abrupt and clumsy tonal shift midway through the third act that leaves its ending particularly disappointing.

It’s based on a novel by Jim Thompson, whose other works – The Getaway, The Grifters, After Dark, My Sweet - stand stark even in the bleak company of the hard-boiled genre. The story centers on Lou Ford, a soft-spoken sheriff’s deputy in small-town Centreville, Texas of the 1950s. Ford is amiable, gentlemanly, and deliberate, obedient to his alcoholic boss (Tom Bower) and content to live in the house left him by  his late doctor father. Some time previous Ford’s adoptive brother died under mysterious circumstances, following lurid innuendo concerning his activities with a child.

When Ford is assigned to investigate the activities of local prostitute Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba), his barely restrained sadism begins to percolate. Actually a sociopath comfortable with his own amorality but happy to disguise it beneath a mild-mannered veneer, he embarks on an affair of rough sex with Joyce while romancing, ostensibly for the sake of appearances, playful but adoring town debutante Amy Stanton (Kate Hudson.) Ford tells himself, and the audience through first-person voiceover narration, that he loves Joyce but can use her to bring about the revenge he’s wanted since his brother’s death.

That revenge involves manipulating her into conning the son (Jay R. Ferguson) of the local construction magnate (Ned Beatty) that Ford blames for his brother’s death. But the revenge is only the excuse, it seems, for Ford to murder the magnate’s son in cold blood and then savagely beat Joyce to death, under a cover of framing the son for her murder but keeping the cash that the son believed would allow him to skip town with Joyce. The resulting brutal violence is central to the film’s greatest ambition but also creates its many failings.

The long, anguished scene in which Ford pummels Joyce, and a later similar scene involving Amy, caused a cyclone of complaints upon the film’s premiere at Sundance and elsewhere, and not without reason – they’re almost impossible to watch without revulsion. Joyce’s death manages, in brutal clarity, to reverse the moral center of the film, turning Ford from interesting if unsympathetic anti-hero (we get small, flashback hints to his true nature several times in the film) to contemptible villain. Affleck seldom changes the temperature of his performance, keeping Ford at the same spacey, plodding cool in almost every scene.

Cleverly, Thompson’s story – adapted by writer/director John Curran – builds a supporting cast that can slide into the vacuum of sympathy created by Ford’s curdling: the well-intentioned if useless sheriff, his earnest deputy (Matthew Maher), a county attorney (Simon Baker), the construction boss suspicious of Ford’s role in the killing, the union organizer who often seems to see through Ford’s “bullshit”; and of course Amy herself, who plans to elope with Ford in the immediate future.

But except for Amy, none of the characters is given the opportunity to establish themselves as presences in the story independent of their relation to Ford; they are not persons themselves so much as types that Ford must evade or manipulate in his day-to-day existence, and in their normalcy they seem scant opposition to his ruthlessness. That’s probably exactly the point Thompson’s book wanted to make (I haven’t read it), that normal civilization is powerless in the face of true evil  – a lesson that’s apparently common in Texas, the original no country for old men. Still, that basic imbalance effectively allows Ford to gambol through the film with no clear threat of retribution. It’s frightening, but not in a way that’s especially rewarding to watch.

Winterbottom’s intention may have been to disconcert the viewer rather than entertain all along; there’s plenty to suggest that the entire purpose is to repulse rather than garner sympathy for Ford’s monstrous depravity. If only the last twenty minutes or so held up that level of malicious drive. Following Amy’s death, music and staging coincide to bring a bizarre and awkward sense of camp to several scenes, including a poorly staged chase sequence through town whose indifferent conclusion grows annoying upon reflection. The equally off-putting ending, rife with contortions that set up weirdly symbolic overlays to the story but that run all over the place tonally, virtually collapses the preceding story into dissolution.

Regarding the performances, Ford is a dangerous part to undertake, and it’s hard to imagine other contemporary leading men hazarding such a risky commitment (imagine Brad Pitt doing something like this.) But Affleck’s determination to make his character casually sociopathic keeps the emotional intensity at a level less than what it needs to bring the film. He also never allows much insight into Ford’s inner psyche, and though again that may have aligned with Thompson or Winterbottom’s design ultimately it makes his performance an important question mumbled in a loud room.

The two women are both well cast, if for different reasons. Hudson has made a career of playing the love interest in comedies with the weight of pollen grains, so watching her act both randy and then victimized has a shock value that works forcibly to the film’s advantage. Alba received a lot of negative press for her performance, including a Razzie award, but she’s adequate and at times even pitiably affecting in a part that doesn’t allow her to do much except get ravished or beaten. Of the male co-stars, Bill Pullman steals scenes (as usual) as a lawyer who comes to Ford’s rescue once the plot steers itself into a corner. Maher, an actor who ought to be seen more, is compelling as the last deputy left  in town to represent real law.

Speaking of the film’s graphic violence against women, Winterbottom told The New York Daily News that the story exists in a “kind of parallel world” that he was “drawn into.” Yet for as much texture as the film has – it’s a visceral, immersive world that irrepressibly sucks you in – there’s almost nothing by way of context or theory to explain Ford’s implacable rage and madness. The resultant displays come off too casual, too callous, as a direct consequence.  And perhaps because the violence is savaged upon women who love and who need to be loved, audiences will expect and for that matter probably have a right to expect closure or at least insight. The women’s performances are good enough that they’ll want to know why; in the absence of such the banality of Ford’s evil inevitably blurs with a lack of articulation of the film’s – and its creators’ – ideas.

They’ll come away disappointed. Ultimately full of problems and dark promise alike, The Killer Inside Me takes us through the life and mind of someone almost impossibly evil but loses itself before offering anything like a way out.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Cedar Rapids

Ed Helms strikes off on his own, into darker territory than you might expect.

Dying is easy and comedy is hard, as the famous adage goes, and by extension of that same logic it’s virtually impossible to get dark comedy right. The wreckage of failed attempts includes the best and the brightest artists of every comedy era, and not a few dramatic creators as well. Dark comedy – black comedy, gallows humor, cringe humor – carries its own additional pitfalls besides the usual minefield of problems awaiting its gentler cousin. And when dark comedy fails, too often the results land with a resounding thud, victims of creative overreach or slipshod understandings of tone.

Cedar Rapids, the at-times pitch-dark new effort from indie mainstay Miguel Arteta, walks its dark comedy tightrope constantly in danger of falling one way or the other. Though ultimately it succeeds, the suspense of waiting for it to collapse under its own ambitious weight suffuses almost every scene. You almost come to care about the movie itself as much as its conventional story or oddball characters, wondering when at any second its whole artifice will come crashing down. It never does, thanks largely to its cast.

A star is brown: Helms

Small-town man-child Tim Lippe (Ed Helms) is sent by his boss (Stephen Root) at Brownstar Insurance to a regional convention after the agency’s alpha dog (Tom Lennon) dies of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Lippe isn’t ready for the responsibility, let alone the pressure of bringing home the convention’s “Two Diamond” award that the agency has secured several years in a row. But he goes anyway, propelled by his boss’ bullying. His wide-eyed, gawky enthusiasm, mixed with rustic suspicion, for the dangers and promises of the titular “big city” provide some of the film’s most unguarded moments.

The convention’s hotel (as uniformly cheerless, and cheerlessly uniform, as any of a million such places in America) and the people Lippe encounters there of course compel him to grow up emotionally and sexually. In particular, he finds himself drawn into the orbit of  hard-partying, foul-mouthed policy “poacher” Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly), comparatively straight-laced Ronald Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) and the sultry, melancholy Joan (Anne Heche.) The quartet goof their way through the three-day conference while Tim readies his presentation to convention patriarch Orin Helgesson (Kurtwood Smith). Moral fortitude and honesty count for a lot in winning the “prestigious” Two Diamond trophy, and in assenting to the group’s temptations – including a fling with Joan – Lippe risks costing his company the award.

Artete works well within the small confines of the hotel, showing the confines of each blandly friendly space and how, especially given the inhospitable winter outside, even such slim diversions as hotel bar margaritas and overheated pools can offer a welcome distraction. It helps a lot that Phil Johnston’s script does right by its main character, shrewdly demonstrating Lippe’s fish out of water ups and downs: his new friends are a welcoming, non-judgmental bunch, a distant cry from the McJesus snobbery of his home town co-workers and neighbors – the same people, Lippe is decent enough to remember, that depend on him. Of course everything works out in the end, but not before plenty of debauchery and clean, if slightly mean-spirited, fun.

As a comic leading man, Helms’ strengths center on the same aw, shucks likability that’s served him more or less unwaveringly since his tenure on The Daily Show.  Lippe is similar to The Office‘s Andy Bernard, more naive but less obtuse, with a greater vulnerability as a result. It’s tempting to thumbnail Lippe as Bernard freed of The Office‘s self-conscious repetition of character and story beats, but there’s more – a little more – to him than that. Helms makes him sympathetic but stops short of making him pitiable or charismatic.

He’s backed by, well, a dream supporting cast for this type of project. Reilly is a leading man trapped in the body of a character actor, and every one of his scenes tends to upset the tenuous balance Artete strikes between Lippe and his surroundings. In fact for much of the film’s first hour, the energy level rises palpably whenever Reilly’s motor- and foul-mouthed party animal comes onscreen. Comedies often rise or fall on the quotability of their dialogue; Reilly has most of the lines you’ll want to repeat to your friends.

The surprise performance, however, belongs to Heche as the otherwise happy soccer mom who uses insurance conventions as a vacation from the staid security of her normal life. Heche is sexy, sad, and smart all at the same time, without resorting to vamping or overheated line readings to achieve said results. Her confession to Lippe about the normalcy of her life and the release of Cedar Rapids carries some of the film’s best writing, and her well-modulated delivery of the scene works as an oasis to the dark shenanigans displayed almost everywhere else. Heche’s career was swallowed years ago by the media’s provincial fascination with her sexuality; this performance earns her a shot at a larger comeback vehicle.

Making the most of smaller roles, Whitlock makes a charming straight man for the others, especially in a late scene in which he gets to spoof his role on The Wire. The prolific Root is hilarious as Lippe’s boss, and Kurtwood Smith brings the same imperial menace to Helgesson that he brought to all those years as That 70s Show‘s Red Foreman. Arrested Development fans may find themselves a little shocked to see Alia Shawkat, Maeby Funke herself, playing the hotel’s prostitute; the role allows her to say filthy things and look sultry, which for a career transition vehicle is possibly as good as it gets right now.

Cedar Rapids shouldn’t be confused for a great film, but it achieves its difficult ambitions while remaining entertaining, and it has the rare gift of growing in your memory after you leave the theatre. If its raunchy gags and sometimes awkward staging keep it from really developing into something approaching a classic modern dark comedy – Rushmore, to make a contemporary example, or Ruthless People – it’s trying for something riskier than the pot and potty humor that dominates too many modern “comedies.” It’s also, admittedly, refreshing to encounter a comedy that doesn’t bear Judd Apatow’s factory-pressed mixture of bittersweet nostalgia and stunted male growth.

Dying is easy, dark comedy is hardest, and ultimately Cedar Rapids is a damned funny movie with a cast full of people who should appear more than they do.  See it  in the theatre if you can, but don’t miss it on home video.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: The Merry Gentleman

Michael Keaton’s directorial debut is smart, opaque, fascinating.

The Merry Gentleman is a film that will frustrate you. You will sometimes wish it moved faster and that it would open itself more, and reveal something besides only the tantalizing amount of information that its very shrewd and deliberate script wants to divulge. The ending will likely haunt you, not in a satisfying sense but rather in a way that compels you to make sense of its painstakingly-wrought ambiguity. And you might actually love the film for all of those reasons.

Directed by Michael Keaton – an intelligent leading man long overdue for a major comeback - from  a script by relative unknown Ron Lazzeretti (The Opera Lover), the film often manages literary feats of structure and innovation while remaining grounded in a concrete sense of place and tone. Keaton also stars as Frank Logan, a solitary and antisocial tailor, drowning in depression and guilt, who also (though we’re never told why) moonlights as a contract hit man. Yet he is not the real star of the film. That place is occupied – gracefully, charmingly - by Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald (No Country For Old Men) as Kate Frazier, a woman escaping her abusive policeman husband by escaping to a nondescript (though vaguely Chicago) major city.

Their solitary existences bring them together at Christmastime, which anyone with depression can tell you is the cruelest time of the year by far. Following a hit on someone in Kate’s office building, Frank attempts to throw himself off a neighboring rooftop, after glimpsing her in a wonderfully constructed moment of grace. But she sees him instead and screams, averting his suicide. Later, the two formally meet as Frank shows her a small kindness, and their friendship begins to percolate. Kate is the type of person you suspect would rather not risk inconveniencing anyone with her company. She’s strong but vulnerable to even the basic ruthlessness that most people take for granted, and her attempts at isolation only draw other lonely souls into her path, including an emotionally needy co-worker (Darlene Hunt) and Dave Murcheson, the police detective (Tom Bastounes) investigating the shooting.

But she’s drawn to Frank, probably as much because he asks nothing of her and doesn’t seem prepared to offer anything for which he might expect gratitude down the line. “I think we’re good for one another,” Kate tells him, and when minutes later she explains, “You’re possibly the sweetest man I’ve ever met” you get a sense of how bad her life must have been to that point. The script moves ahead in time, cleverly, and there’s a sense as spring rolls around that the two are making progress helping one another. Then of course their respective pasts close in on them. Kate’s husband (Bobby Cannavale) tracks her down, spouting born-again Christian rhetoric that, not surprisingly, makes the skittish Kate even more terrified. Meanwhile Murcheson and his partner dog the shooting investigation as well as the apparent suicide of one of Frank’s associates. Frank is unafraid, permanently removing Kate’s husband from her life and continuing his tailoring business.

The pivotal scenes arrive as Murcheson visits Frank’s store. The two men size each other up, instant dislike getting submerged by going-through-the-motions polite conversation. “I tend to see the suit, not the person inside it,” Frank tells him, a pretty unsubtle way of explaining that life is often meaningless to him. Murchison ambles off, ready to confront Kate – the object of his affection as well as a potential witness and accomplice alike – of his concerns. His clumsy, well-intentioned effort pushes Kate and Frank into a confrontation that’s minimal on dialogue but no less emotionally resonant. Kate is ready for them to admit the truth about each other but Frank’s not there yet, setting up an ending that leaves more questions than it’s prepared to answer.

Even when playing the comic buffoon (Beetlejuice, Mr. Mom), Keaton the actor has always prioritized reserve, holding something back from the audience that gave his characters nuance and depth. In directing a film his greatest flaw may be following that impulse with too much trust. The film is slow-paced, and there are times when the script begs for elaboration – even a hint or line of dialogue would suffice. And as good as Lazzeretti’s script is at building suspense and giving its characters lines worth saying out loud, it also often explains something (such as in Kate’s dialogue mentioned above) that’s obvious to anyone paying attention. As the film dares its audience to think, the occasional lapse in artistry feels too much like “gimme” questions. The narrative skips ahead at least once, leaving details in its timeline unresolved.

But these complaints are petty grievances. Keaton knows how to direct himself and (with one exception) his actors, mining fascinating complexities out of virtually every role. MacDonald gives Kate layers of anxiety and innocence, letting her be paranoid in one scene and carefree the next. Bastounes is exceptional as the self-sabotaging Murheson, a man at once reaching out for someone’s warmth but retreating into his police authority whenever challenged. He’s the third part of Frank and Kate’s lonely constellation, dimmer by comparison but no less sincere despite his lack of self-awareness. Only Cannavale fails to impress, bringing too much ham to his rambling fire-and-brimstone monologue. We understand that his character is a petty and vile man because Kate has already sold us on the idea. Cannavale’s overacting only sets her own efforts back.

And the ending: vague, inconclusive, maddeningly open to interpretation. There are dozens of pat endings possible, and if you’ve been watching movies for any length of time you can imagine probably half that many without really trying. If the last five minutes are flawed, they’re still not enough to undermine the beauty and intelligence of the 105 minutes preceding them. The Merry Gentleman is in that sense daring right until its wide-open end.

-Michael Kabel

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Secret Stars: Six Actors Who Deserve More Recognition

If we had our way this would be the Hollywood A-list

Plenty of people in Hollywood are overrated. Movies and television shows teem with actors who were either lucky, shrewd, good-looking, or well-connected enough to rise despite a certain lack of talent. Probably every one has their own pet example – a movie star, an ingenue starlet or a pretty boy semi-celeb – that illustrates just what a capricious bitch good fortune really is, especially when Fame is at stake.

Obviously we watch too many movies and waaayyy too much television, and as a result we’ve seen some actors come and go that we wish worked more. The list below isn’t comprehensive and it’s not scientific; of course it’s not objective either. But if you see one of these actors on a screen, pay attention and you’re guaranteed to see good work.

Lee Tergesen: Of the hundreds of actors (we’re only slightly exaggerating) that came out of the late and much-missed HBO series Oz, perhaps no one is more overdue for widespread acclaim than the actor that brought Tobias Beecher to life. Tergesen’s done laps around the guest star circuit, appearing on the Law & Orders as well as CSI and Masters of Horror, but he’s an astonishingly versatile actor who deserves a wider audience. Possible liability: Suffers from The Nancy Travis Paradox: not pretty enough for leading roles, too charismatic for supporting parts. Notable performance: Any of his scene-stealing guest spots on Rescue Me and Desperate Housewives. Next appears: In this year’s Iraq War HBO mini Generation Kill.

Maria Bello: A true actor’s actor, Maria Bello has held her own against leading men as diverse as Mel Gibson and Viggo Mortensen. Her performances are dependably well-modulated and restrained, showing a technique built on craftsmanship rather than showing off for the camera with a lot of tics and strutting (probably why the Academy routinely ignores her.) Possible liability: Conspicuously not above taking paycheck roles such as in Coyote Ugly. Notable performance: Breathing new life into the waitress-with-a-heart-of-gold archetype in The Cooler. Next appears: Adventuring with Brendan Fraser in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

Stephen Root: An actor whose fame has remained at an unreasonable volume for much of his career, Root’s turn as the flopsweating Milton Waddams in 1999′s Office Space made the Swingline stapler a hip accessory. He’s since appeared in O Brother, Where Art Thou?  and done regular work on underrated series like King of the Hill and News Radio. Possible liability: Hollywood only has so many parts for heavyset men that don’t involve buffoon schtick. Notable performance: He’s Milton Waddams, for Christ’s sake. Next appears: In Joe Wright’s (Atonement) Oscar-bait biopic The Soloist, opposite Robert Downey Jr. and Catherine Keener.

Gretchen Mol: Sometimes early fame is a curse. Mol shot to overweening public exposure in the late 90s, a time when new actors were mercilessly forced upon the public. Following starring roles in underperforming films like Rounders and The Thirteenth Floor, Mol built a career in indie cinema including Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things and last year’s The Ten. Possible liability: A tendency to appear in films that aren’t as good as they should be. Notable performance: Her fearless and revelatory starring performance in 2005′s The Notorious Bettie Page. Next appears: Opposite Luke Wilson in the indie comedy Tenure.

Gina Torres: We’re sort of convinced that Fame owes Gina Torres money. If you’re even a little bit geek, you’ve seen her in something: Firefly, 24, Alias, and several more genre serials. A gifted character actress, Torres plays strong women effortlessly without sacrificing her femininity. Possible liability: She may be typecast in geek culture roles. Notable performance: As first mate and Nathan Fillion’s conscience in Joss Whedon’s wildly uneven Serenity. Next appears: In the indie drama Don’t Let Me Drown, about two Latino teens in the aftermath of September 11th (yeah, that old cliche.)

Michael Hogan: Battlestar Galactica has made its mistakes, but even its low points were made gripping thanks to screen-melting performances by Mary McDonnell, Edward James Olmos, and especially Michael Hogan as the troubled and self-loathing Colonel Saul Tigh. Adding layers of emotion to what in other hands might’ve been a generic hardass role, Hogan never resorts to capital-A acting to communicate his character’s complexity. Possible liability: Long-running science fiction shows often become an albatross for their casts’ later careers. Notable performance: Parodying the Tigh character on Adult Swim’s Robot Chicken. Next appears: Helping Galactica grind to a conclusion in its final season.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD: Lars And The Real Girl

Lazy Direction Deflates Character Study Into Fluffy Hipster Romcom

Director Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl is a study of the toll that mental illness can exact upon a person, a subject usually neglected in contemporary cinema. Though anxious to foster sympathy, the film ends up trivializing its dark subject matter by veering into the realm of cute, oversimplified fantasy.

The film’s titular Lars (Ryan Gosling) suffers from intense shyness: uncomfortable around other people and terrified of physical contact. To stifle his loneliness, he purchases a “real doll,” an incredibly lifelike, anatomically correct mannequin (read: sex toy) that he names Bianca. His relationship with the doll is completely innocent and nonsexual, but he nevertheless invents a personal history for it and routinely speaks to it as if it were an actual person. So when his family doctor (Patricia Clarkson) abandons conventional psychology and instructs Lars’ friends and family to indulge him in his delusions, they accept the doll as one of the gang. But as he becomes increasingly unable to monopolize Bianca’s use, Lars grows ever more possessive and resentful of the “life” that it has without him. Of course he eventually gets better, and cue the crowd-pleasing happy ending.

The premise certainly carries the potential for relevance, with its contrast of a seductively impossible ideal versus confronting riskier chances for genuine happiness. Martin Scorsese brilliantly examined a similar conceit in his dark masterpiece The King of Comedy. But dark waters scare the kids, and Gillespie chickens out with trendier fare. The angst is sugar-coated in twee for its audience: fuzzy vintage sweaters, whimsically rugged faces and quaint Rockwellian settings abound. Sure, the intentionally cute and precious trappings make the potentially unsettling subject matter more palatable, but they also distract from Lars’ pain – the heart of the matter. So to remind the viewer of the hero’s distress, Gillespie employs clumsily facile camerawork: shaky, handheld cameras are used when Lars is onscreen, but stationary cameras capture the action when he isn’t. Lars is unstable everyone! Because the camera says so! Do you get it? Do you?

Nancy Oliver’s script provides amateurishly little insight into the cause of Lars’ delusions, doling out occasional crumbs about his mother’s untimely death during childbirth and his anxiety about his sister-in-law’s pregnancy. Millions of unfortunate people grow up without a mother, but there’s no explanation for the extraordinary degree of Lars’s trauma or the outlandish results it compels. Once Bianca arrives, suspension of disbelief goes out the window – nobody makes fun of him for walking around town with a sex toy? The local minister allows it into his church service? And what healthcare provider in the world would admit a sex doll into an emergency room? 

Even worse, the dialogue smacks of boilerplate made-for-Lifetime drivel, hitting its nadir when Lars’s sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer) explains the town’s collective decision to serve as an enabler: “All these people love you! We do it for you!”

Despite the glaring scriptural shortcomings, the film could still be salvaged if Gillepsie made the audience care about Lars as a character. Regrettably, Gosling’s synthetic performance consists of a string of overly-rehearsed tics and tells incapable of eliciting anything beyond an occasional bemused grin. It’s a plastic performance for a plastic film. On the bright side Clarkson, quite possibly the most underrated actress around right now, brings much needed gravitas, while Mortimer exudes frustrated compassion as Lars’s pregnant sister-in-law. Kelli Garner is adorable as a goofball co-worker inexplicably smitten with Lars.  Oddly the most compelling and genuine scenes occur between Lars and his guilt-stricken older brother Gus (Paul Schneider, in a radical departure from his creepy turn in The Assassination of Jesse James).

By no means the first film to focus on an unsound protagonist, Lars and the Real Girl lacks the palpable tension and desperation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s similar Punch Drunk Love, and doesn’t remotely approach the hopeless anguish of Scorsese’s The Aviator.  Admittedly, mental illness is a tough sell, but to cloak such an uncomfortable subject with illusions of universal warmth and acceptance is baldly irresponsible. Rather than take the opportunity to seriously and sensitively foster dialogue, Gillespie exploits a condition by creating a feel-good romcom for the Sundance set.

- Steve Kabel