PicoBlog

For reasons I don’t entirely remember, I used to sometimes listen to audio commentaries for reasons other than writing them up for The A.V. Club column Commentary Tracks of the Damned. 

I listened to George Clooney’s audio commentary for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, for example, but had to shut it off after about an hour for two reasons. For starters, it was boring. George Clooney may be a smart and accomplished filmmaker but all he talked about on the commentary was where he “borrowed” each individual shot and which specific movie he was ripping off.

The more I listened to the commentary, the less respect I had for Clooney as a filmmaker, because he was clearly more than happy to borrow from every filmmaker and film that he loved rather than creating something new. 

I thought a lot about that audio commentary while watching Fool’s Paradise, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia scene-stealer and all-around comic genius Charlie Day’s debut as a writer-director-leading man. 

It’s one of those debuts that somehow manage to feel both new and wildly, unapologetically derivative. Fool’s Paradise sometimes feels less like a conventional motion picture than a mix-tape compiling all of the movies Day grew up digging. 

Fool’s Paradise, Charlie Day’s cinematic debut as a screenwriter and director, isn’t influenced or inspired by Hal Ashby’s 1979 masterpiece Being There so much as it’s the cinematic equivalent of a musical cover that changes a few notes but leaves the core fundamentally the same. Ashby isn’t the only filmmaker Day channels here. He’s nearly as indebted to the fussy compositions and innate sadness of American film’s preeminent Andersons, Wes and Paul Thomas. Day even hired Paul Thomas Anderson’s regular composer Jon Brion for that signature sad carnival sound, mood and vibe. 

Day journeys back even further when conceptualizing the real role of Latte Pronto. Day’s baby-faced protagonist is an angelic man-child with the intellect of a five year old or agreeable puppy. Also, he doesn’t talk. He is fundamentally a mute with an unfortunate habit of looking at the camera while acting but when self-destructive lookalike movie star Sir Tom Bingsley (also Day) dies Latte improbably takes over for him and becomes an overnight celebrity. 

As in Being There, society projects onto the beautiful blank at the film’s center all manner of positive attributes. They’re confronted with an idiot-savant who is plenty idiotic but decidedly lacking in the savant category and see only positive qualities and gifts that Latte does not possess. 

Despite his unfortunate knack for looking into the camera and unwillingness to say words Latte nevertheless rockets to superstardom as the unlikeliest of movie stars. 

Day does double-duty as Sir Tom Bingsley. Sir Tom Bingsley is Latte’s antithesis. He’s a raging id with an insatiable lust for money and fame and drugs and alcohol and debauchery in all of its forms. 

Unfortunately Sir Tom Bingsley dies a predictable, even inevitable death not long after we meet him. At that point he is replaced in seemingly every way by a doppelgänger who couldn’t be more different even as he could not look more similar. 

Latte more or less falls sideways into a fling with glamorous movie star Christiana Dior (Kate Beckinsale). In keeping with the film’s dress-up party/come-as-your-favorite-film-character-aesthetic, Beckinsale seems to be channeling the off-putting otherworldliness of Julianne Moore as Maude Lebowski. 

Latte’s improbable ascent to the height of fame is alternately helped and hindered by his sad sack publicist Lenny (Ken Jeong). 

Lenny is the film’s second most important character. He’s supposed to be a Broadway Danny Rose like figure of pathos and sadness but Lenny is ruined by casting. Jeong branded himself as the loudest, and most obnoxious carny on The Masked Singer far too successfully for him to be able fit into this kind of twee, precious Wes Anderson lite fare. 

Ken Jeong ruined Ken Jeong as anything but the loudest, most abrasive, attention-demanding ham, which makes his central presence here all the more unfortunate. The film’s problems go way beyond the miscasting of Jeong but I couldn’t help but think how much better the movie would be with someone like Jeffrey Wright or Paul Giamatti in the role. 

Protagonists don’t get more passive than Latte. He seems content just to exist and is flummoxed by the curious ways of movie world folk, with their massive egos and insatiable desires. 

Latte doesn’t want anything. In the movie business that makes him an anomaly. Day’s silent passivity wouldn’t be a problem if the movie wasn’t so hopelessly pokey in its pacing and sloppy in its storytelling. A lot of thought and care clearly went into individual images and moments but the slim excuse for a plot just sort of ambles sideways before ending up nowhere. 

That’s one of the film’s many problems. It has no forward momentum or urgency. It’s an episodic ramble through the Forrest Gump-like existence of a cipher, a fool whose foolishness can’t help but expose the foolishness of a culture and a world that elevates a simpleton with the mind of a child to a place of prominence in first the movie world and then politics. 

This shift into the world of politics affords the film an opportunity to cosplay as yet another masterpiece from New Hollywood. When John Malkovich blusters about the fundamental nature of the universe it feels like he’s doing a piss-poor impression of Ned Beatty’s big speech in Network. 

I’ve long been annoyed by reviews where the critic says that they really, really wanted to like a movie, that they came into it with nothing but love, curiosity and excitement but were heartbroken to discover that the movie in question is fundamentally, incontrovertibly unlovable. 

So if I might once again make a hypocrite of myself, Fool’s Paradise is a movie that I REALLY wanted to love. On paper I love just about everything about it. I think Day is a comic genius and a brilliant physical comedian as well as the writer or co-writer of some of the funniest episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. By extension, that means that he’s also written some of the funniest half hours of television EVER. New Hollywood is my favorite cinematic period.

I’m a huge fan of Hal Ashby and consider Being There perfect. Heck, while we’re talking about Peter Sellers movies this resembles, I’m also a huge fan of The Party, minus the whole brownface thing, and The Party is one of many films Fool’s Paradise lovingly steals from. 

It’s entirely possible that I will warm up to Fool’s Paradise because it very much seems like the sort of thing I WOULD love. Unfortunately, my first impression is that I very much was underwhelmed. 

Day is a tremendous talent but this feels like a vanity project from a popular entertainer who, alas, may not get a second chance to establish himself as a cinematic auteur as well as a beloved, scene-stealing film and movie star. 

Two out of Four Stars 

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