If he had done that, it might have been hilarious, though in an acidly downbeat and far-reaching way.
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(The single most influential movie of the past 40 years? Without question, “National Lampoon’s Animal House.” A project spearheaded by Doug Kenney.)īut Wain made a terrible mistake when he decided to turn Kenney’s story into a goof, a sketch, a riff of threadbare mockery, instead of treating it as a relatively straight movie with laughs. The time has more than come for a dramatic feature that takes stock of the comedy revolution of the ’70s - one that, I would argue, changed the soul of America. Wain grew up in middle-class Ohio, just like Kenney, and the notion of a Doug Kenney biopic sounded like a perfect fit for him.
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In the years since, he has crafted some reasonably sharp comedies, like “Role Models” (2008) and “Wanderlust” (2012), in addition to his more adventurous TV work. The first film he directed (alongside his co-creator, Michael Showalter) was “Wet Hot American Summer” (2001), the ’80s-summer-camp-schlock sendup that’s now rightfully regarded as a delectable classic of pinpoint absurdist satire. I say none of this with any vengeful glee, since David Wain, the director of “A Futile and Stupid Gesture,” is an artist of comedy I have long admired. Theoretically, the idea of his older self telling his own story might have worked, if we didn’t feel like it was just another half-baked thing the movie was throwing against the wall. I should add that the 74-year-old Mull portrays the elderly Doug Kenney - a bizarre conceit, given that Kenney died, in 1980, at the age of 33, after falling off a cliff in Hawaii, in what was most likely a suicide. We blink away the disbelief as we realize the film is intentionally trying to palm off its ineptitude as “style.” At one point the film’s narrator, Martin Mull, in what’s supposed to be a cheeky meta way, acknowledges that the actors playing Belushi, etc., don’t look at all like their real-life counterparts. In “A Futile and Stupid Gesture,” characters like Chevy Chase and John Belushi and Bill Murray keep showing up, and each time we have to do a double take, because what we see are actors who look nothing like them, in obvious wigs, barely trying to impersonate them. And given that this is a true story of mass media, pop culture, and a handful of madcap nihilistic visionaries who more than a few viewers already know a lot about, the amateur-hour inauthenticity of it all is nearly too much to bear. The scenes lurch and stumble by, slammed together in the editing room with a kind of awkward utilitarian indifference. The lighting is flat and plain and milky-drab. 26) that premiered yesterday at Sundance, you’re confronted, head-on, with the quintessence of the Netflix-original-film aesthetic, and it is not a pretty sight. (I don’t mean a budget for sideburn-growing I mean a budget that would allow the filmmakers the luxury of time to shoot in continuity.) But when you watch “A Futile and Stupid Gesture,” a Netflix release (it’s available starting Friday, Jan.
I know, I know: There probably wasn’t the budget for it.
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