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Farce can flow freely from cleverly constructed circumstances, or feel forced through contrivance — and the line between the two is thinner and flimsier than most might think. It just takes one convenience too many to stretch even exaggerated scenarios too far, or to make ribaldry based on repetition peter out. In She’s Funny That Way, writer/director Peter Bogdanovich pushes that limit.
Making his first feature since 2001’s The Cat’s Meow, Bogdanovich and co-scribe Louise Stratten plunge headfirst into a long-gestating script and situation that struggles within its own boundaries from the outset. Famous actress Isabella Patterson (Imogen Poots, A Long Way Down) is asked to reflect upon her early days breaking into the fame game, including rumours about her salacious start. As the Brooklynite recalls the director, Arnold Albertson (Owen Wilson, Inherent Vice), who first gave her a shot in a Broadway production; his wife and her co-star, Delta Simmons (Kathryn Hahn, Tomorrowland); and Delta’s former lover and fellow cast member, Seth Gilbert (Rhys Ifans, Madame Bovary), she spins a story about love and lust as much as her chosen profession.
The romantic tangles in her tale don’t stop there, with Izzy’s no-nonsense therapist, Jane Claremont (Jennifer Aniston, Horrible Bosses 2), Jane’s playwright boyfriend, Joshua Fleet (Will Forte, TV’s The Last Man on Earth), and his private-eye father (George Morfogen, Damages) also immersed in the mix. So unravels a film as concerned with the number of recognisable faces it can shoehorn into the frame as it is with appearing quirky at all costs, the banter coming thick and fast, and the bawdiness as well, but the balance a far cry from the screwball greats — including the director’s own What’s Up, Doc? from four decades ago — that the film clearly aspires to emulate.
That Bogdanovich, his cinematographer Yaron Orbach (Begin Again), and editors Nick Moore (Mirror Mirror) and Pax Wassermann (Cartel Land) put the film together in as easy, breezy-looking fashion as they can certainly helps try to patch over the clunkiness and clumsiness that emanates; that affection — for farce as a concept, for the comedies that inspired the feature, and for the feeling of cultivated chaos that results — is evident does as well. Of course, that the mess and mayhem is slyly and tiringly by design can’t be shaken, particularly in the recurrence of what becomes the movie’s nonsensical catchphrase as well as its misplaced source of narrative drama and comic momentum.
It is hardly surprising, then, that the cast wavers with the material — and with what the filmmaker has seemingly asked of each player. Poots and Hahn steal the show from their male co-stars, and do what no one else in the feature can master: make viewers care, even fleetingly, about their characters. Indeed, missing in the bickering and the bed-hopping is any semblance of a point or purpose other than lightweight entertainment, and given that’s largely lacking for the modest 93-minute duration, it leaves an effort poised to be fun instead falling flat. Even when it manages to charm in its sprawling anarchy, or steal a few hard-earned giggles, She’s Funny That Way always seems as superfluous and perfunctory as its title.
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
She’s Funny That Way
Director: Peter Bogdanovich
Germany / USA, 2014, 93 mins
Release date: August 27
Distributor: Disney
Rated: M
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