thurberdrawing

Brilliant, is what I say. Terence Rattigan's 1950 play was filmed once before (and while I have not seen it, I can't think it would be more effective than the new version) but the current film puts the lie to our weird nostalgia for the "Keep Calm and Carry On" era. This movie is cool, efficient and heartbreaking. And it is directed with an eye on Rattigan's increasing stature. When one character goes on a John Osbourne style rant, we are not meant to fall for this particular Angry Young Man. Of course, Rattigan wrote it just before the Angry Young Man began storming the British stage. It shows he was gearing up for the onslaught. Rattigan is often mistaken for a conventional dramatist, but his explosions are deeper than Osbourne's, perhaps because he himself (Rattigan) doesn't cultivate anger. He knew how and when to use it.

This is a really good movie based on one of the oldest themes imaginable. Laugh, clown, laugh is done right this time. I'll dispense with the summary and hone in on some things I think worth mentioning: All the actors are fully present. As movies with Beatles-references go, this one is sophisticated. The movie is book-ended by a Paul McCartney song and a John Lennon song. If the movie is about friendship (and it is) it can't be an accident that songs from the solo careers of the Beatles' song-writing duo were used. Theirs was quite the show-biz friendship. Adam Sandler does justice to John Lennon's unfinished song "Real Love," which, before this, has only existed in demo versions and in the version Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr sang to the accompanying demo. In short, Sandler's version may be the first finished version of the song. The other songs on the soundtrack are all pretty good. The movie looks really good, the way Blake Edwards' PINK PANTHER movies always did. As long as the camera focuses on fabulous wealth, it may as well look alluring. And it does. The scenes from George Simmons's (Sandler's) other movies are very good parodies of those sorts of scenes. The behavior of the various comedians who appear as themselves is relatively realistic. The cameos are done in the right context. At least one really famous comedian seems to be in disguise in one of these cameos. If it's not the man I'm thinking of, whoever it was was funny anyway. We don't get too much of Simmons's shtick. We get him in the present (outside of the old film clips of himself which he watches and shows his friends) and this is enough to show us he is a deadly funny guy who's beginning not to find things funny anymore. As someone who has always fantasized about being a stand-up comic, this movie plays for me the way a baseball epic would to a baseball nut. I liked it largely because of the world it shows. For a movie which could have ended about forty-five minutes before it did, it still maintained a high level of interest. Its plot turns, not entirely unpredictable, were amusing. It's a thoughtful comedy.