Dummy

Let's face it: even Woody Allen has gotten stale setting up laughs using the stereotypical Jewish dysfunctional family (is there an oxymoron in that description?). It's been done so many times. The welcome surprise is that director and writer Greg Pritikin takes this old kreplach (in place of chestnut) and makes it work with a novel theme brought to life by a terrific cast.

Adrien Brody made this movie before his Oscar-winning portrayal of a gifted Jewish musician in "The Pianist." Here he is a young man, Steve, whose lifelong ambition (he's bordering on thirty) is to become a ventriloquist. He buys a dummy and takes lessons (Brody, who passed fairly well as a concert pianist in his better known film, actually did all the dummy tricks and ventriloquism here).

Steve lives at home with his mom (Jessica Walter) who is forever shoving food at everyone. His dad (Ron Leibman) is retired and he pursues a common hobby of men no longer gainfully employed: making scale model warships while watching hard core porn. Sister Heidi (Ileana Douglas) dreamed of becoming a singer. Her ambition crushed, largely by her scatterbrain mother, she is now a wedding planner, her first big job creating agita in the first degree. She's pursued by a clearly insane former fiance to her distress.

Steve's closest friend from high school days is rock singer Fangera (Milla Jovovich) who has a cum laude Master's in Public Crudity. Their relationship is platonic and Fangera is very albeit crazily devoted to her longtime buddy. Desperate for work for herself and her band, she passes herself off to Heidi as a klezmer specialist, exactly what the despairing wedding planner needs for her first big event. Of course she knows nothing about klezmer music and her immersion in studying that genre is a riot by itself. So is the payoff at the wedding.

Steve, fired from his job, meets employment counselor Lorena (Vera Farmiga) and sparks of all kind begin to fly. Lorena is a single mother with an adorable little girl and she's both attracted to Steve and shy about a commitment. Their relationship, which begins with a weird approach concocted by the barely sane Fangera, rolls back and forth and is kind of touching.

No need to say more about the plot. This fast-paced romantic comedy works with all the principal cast members playing off each other in an often funny and occasionally serious and meaningful way. Surprises are few but when has a ventriloquist's dummy been central to story development in any recent film?

The special features on the DVD are fun. Included is an interactive test in which the viewer answers a series of questions and then finds out what kind of dummy he or she is. I was ranked a ...hey, that's my personal business.

There's also a storyboard history of ventriloquism which points out that this entertainment form allowed, decades ago, a performer to "say" things through his dummy that would have been unacceptable directly from his mouth (including negative comments about politicians).

As usual, reading the credits closely paid off. The technical adviser was Paul Winchell and the assistant technical adviser...Jerry Mahoney. I think you have to be from my generation to appreciate that.

8/10

Adrien Brody is quietly wonderful as an unemployed nebbish in his late twenties who stills lives with his parents and has a fascination with ventriloquism; he finally buys a dummy of his own and practices the craft he's dreamed about, yet also realizes (via his new wooden companion) that it may be time to start growing up. Greg Pritikin wrote and directed this low-budget satire of suburban craziness, and seems to harbor an affection for bughouse characters all living on the edge. It isn't an original vision (Hal Hartley was mining this dryly eccentric territory 10 years ago), but it's still surprising how successfully Pritikin manages to pull this intentionally bumpy story together. Milla Jovovich is initially off-putting playing Brody's friend, a foul-mouthed garage rocker, but when she gets her band a job playing klesmer songs at a wedding--and immerses herself in the Jewish language--she reveals an appealing, sassy side that totally fits into Pritikin's offbeat universe. Illeana Douglas and Vera Farmiga are also very fine, and though the construction of the script is caricature-oriented, most of these actors overcome the slight material, revealing something unexpected in the process: a sunny story about weirdos that ultimately celebrates humanity. **1/2 from ****

Dummy (2002)

A fun, offbeat, somewhat frivolous charcoal gray comedy. It's hilarious in spots and touching in spots, and has some terrific acting. The overall scenario is a situation comedy, drawn out over the hour and a half, and it might have made a tighter hour long television show. At times it seems to really hit an eccentric tone that's terrific and even a little surreal, as with some of the family interactions, played with beautiful deadpan steadiness. And when it's a moving romantic comedy, you appreciate the restrained, sympathetic acting of several of the leads. There isn't a bad performance in the lot of them.

I really liked the quirky humour and though Adrien Brody's acting was astonishing, the ensemble playing and the interplay of dummy and people was what made the film work for me. I am an ignorant English Quaker and I had a simple question for the director or Adrien or any other American viewers. Is Adrien's character meant to represent a specifically Jewish character, or is the film, as I suspect, more universal in its design?

I teach 11-16 year olds and have written books on mainstreaming children with special needs. I may have read the movie all wrong, but to me the humour brought alive all the hassle that children with Asperger's Syndrome have, trying to communicate their ideas and feelings to an uncomprehending world. My old school has one of the best records in UK for bringing children on the autistic spectrum out of special schools into ordinary classrooms and get great results for them. It takes real love for the staff to help the other children treat them with the kind of respect they need to show their proper talents. The anguish in Adrien's eyes was met with perfect friendship and love in his sister and girl friends and I thought that it was this that helped him reveal his true talents.

I have never filled in a comments box like this before and I only do so because Dummy is one of my all time favourite movies

Respect

Steven (Adrien Brody), nearly 30 and living with his parents, sees an old Edgar Bergen movie on TV and decides to fulfill his longtime dream of becoming a ventriloquist. His beautiful unemployment counselor Lorena (Vera Farmiga) finds him work, but puts out a restraining order on him when he paints a thank-you note on her door. Later, this young mother agrees to date him anyway, but finds his bickering family, and his inexperience with women, daunting to a relationship. Steven's sister Heidi (Illeana Douglas) is a wedding planner with a drunken ex-fiancé who keeps showing up at the door. His friend Fangora (Milla Jovavich) is a pseudo-punk rocker whose sex does not prevent her from giving him terrible advice about women. The wedding of a Jewish girl, who wants Klezmer music and gets something unexpected, will become a turning point in everyone's lives.

Whoa, this is bad. Greg Pritikin directs his own script, about a tenth of which is funny. The rest strains hard to give us quirky characters, wacky situations and unexpected plot twists; but we can't buy any of it. The movie becomes unrecoverable when Lorena changes her mind about the restraining order and agrees to date Steven—after he mails her a videotaped apology featuring himself and his dummy. The message on her door disturbed her, but the tape charmed her? I could almost hear Vera Farmiga's brain going "ZZZZZT!" as she tried to play this character. Their relationship grows into the least believable nerd-with-beautiful-girl scenario I've ever seen.

The performances are varied. Adrien Brody recovers fairly well from playing such a pointless character. Farmiga is charming, especially considering the impossibility of her job. Jovavich, with her affected Jersey accent, never quite seems to inhabit her character. Illeana Douglas, a good actress, does a lousy job here. She doesn't seem to get what she's doing, and we can hardly blame her.

This is part of a sub-genre in comedy that I dislike: one that blurs the distinction between celebrating and belittling the losers it depicts. "Napoleon Dynamite," "Waiting for Guffman" and documentaries like "American Movie" and "Gates of Heaven" all belong in this dubious category. But "Dummy" is much worse. It's as phony as it is condescending.