Sometimes you don’t want to punch down. That being said vanity projects can often be when bad some of the most fun to punch up at. But sometimes you don’t want to punch down. I feel this to be the case with Charlie Day’s directorial debut from a screenplay he also wrote, Fool’s Paradise. Despite the amount of talent involved and despite the immense Hollywood standing of the writer and director, the film does feel earnest and effortful, it just is quite bad, which feels more like downward punching than anything else. The story of a mute and disabled (but never mentioned explicitly what disability to keep the tone ‘light’ one guesses) individual walking the streets of L.A, only to be dragged into and through the world of the movie business and experiencing without any onus or motivation a full arc of rise and fall in the industry. I love Day. I really do and hoped this would be a successful endeavour. It is however in so many fundamental ways just not.
It’s just Being There but bad. Frankly I can’t believe I’ve listened to multiple reviews and not heard the name of that classic and timeless Hal Ashby classic once. This is just Being There but without any of the power or subtlety. Which made me frame this review with the mental question of what makes that film work and what makes this film so infuriatingly bad, boring and awfully annoying time and time again. There is after all so much talent involved here. Every single scene features one or two actors of great talent who have come in to help Day perhaps and lend their name or put themselves in a feature that on the page perhaps worked terrifically. Perhaps, perhaps per- It has to be the first one. Being There has commentary of a nature that goes beyond the simplistic, however Paradise time and time again just takes the same cliché low hanging fruit of all Hollywood satires and comedies and just puts great actors in these surface level gags and characters to elevate the material slightly. The issue is of course that this by no means easy material to elevate, in the end its risen to about a 3/10 for me. The film just at a core level does not work. Its arcs of emotionality rear their hands far too late and are unplausible. Many characters are annoying to such an extent that their annoyance hangs over scenes they are not in, like the after-effect of a scare in a horror film, as we shudder whenever these annoying characters will return to the screen. We shudder and cringe and await in terror. The loose narrative and- Forgive me- Sullivan’s Travels-esque style of the film leads to an abundance of characters and in turn with this film ensemble, wonderful faces we love to watch. Yet every single time there is seemingly no break to the constant trawl and we are never granted a character that leads one to crack a smile. It’s the actors we love that make us happy, not anything at all they are doing and by the halfway mark, seeing these actors actually make you sad that this is what they are doing… and on a dark note, this is what there final film ended up as.
Day is an incredibly gifted physical performer and here as a faux Chaplin is great. Again… On a surface level. It’s all on a surface level. As is the case with all of the performances in the film with regret, there really are no standouts to my critical eye, again with regret. There are oddities of great randomness; a last minute Common in a plainly thin and unfunny guise of Wesley Snipes and his infamous Blade method acting as a character who now is homeless despite once playing Dagger. This is also at such a late stage in the movie where the film has already lost so much faith that it garners great anger that we still have more left and it’s just not going to get any better any time soon. John Malkovich even appears for a worse version of Ned Beatty’s Network scene. It’s just also terribly annoying or terribly boring despite the bizarreness of much of it, again… with regret. Day is so likable and I have truly loved much of his work thus far. It’s such a shame that this is how this review must be directed, however this film is an unfortunate mess.
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An unfortunate 3/10 ‘disaster’. I hate saying ‘disaster’, but the only way to redeem this movie is to make the bold and unbelievable argument that it is four levels of metatextuality ahead of us and is in actuality a parody of Hollywood parodies. But even then this does not have that clear intentionality to make a premise like that work. There are jokes that land, but they are desperately few and far between and overall Day has unfortunately floundered with this filmic effort.
P.S. It’s fair to say that of our three It’s Always Sunny creators, with football entrepreneurialism and this bomb in the other lanes, Glen Howerton with Blackberry is going far and above. I wish it was more even of a spread of success, however when Howerton wins his Oscar for best supporting actor, he will certainly be ahead. Fingers crossed, fingers crossed, fingers crossed.
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Thomas Carruthers
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