From today's Oregonian….
I come not to bury "What Just Happened?" the movie, but to praise "What Just Happened?" the book.
(Well, and to bury "What Just Happened?" the movie -- which director Barry Levinson has rendered drab and humorless in the way the source material really, really isn't.)
The book is terrific. It's producer Art Linson's jaded memoir of his unfortunate run at Twentieth Century Fox in the late '90s -- during which he produced a modernized "Great Expectations," a barely seen ensemble comedy called "Sunset Strip," and "The Edge," which you may know by its alternate title, "The Movie Written by David Mamet in which Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin Fight A Bear." Even Linson's quality pictures during this stretch, "Fight Club" and "Pushing Tin," either failed to find an audience in theaters or left executives scratching their heads in an era of higher concepts and lower risk-taking.
Linson has produced bona-fide classics including "Heat," "The Untouchables" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," and in print this experience seems to give him a surprising fearlessness. Over barely 150 darkly funny, fast-moving pages, he names names as he explains how the business end of Hollywood works, detailing executive cluelessness and celebrity meltdowns -- including one infamous temper-tantrum by Alec Baldwin after "the suits" dared to ask the star to shave his beard.
The movie, unfortunately, is kind of a drag.
Linson, who wrote the script, has created a producer character named Ben (Robert DeNiro) to tie together the book's anecdotes. Except that Linson doesn't really use any of the book's anecdotes, except for that bearded temper-tantrum (recreated by Bruce Willis, who gamely plays himself). Instead of Linson and other characters cackling and cringing and casually lying in the face of epic professional failure, as they do throughout the book, Linson has Ben shuttling between his ex-wives (including Robin Wright Penn). We watch Ben attend an agent's funeral and a Vanity Fair photo-shoot and get dressed in front of mirrors and have phone calls with other men getting dressed in front of mirrors. He also takes dull meetings and sits in test-screenings with listless audiences. And we watch Ben's cachet slip away as he deals with both "the beard situation" and a pill-popping British director (Michael Wincott) who wants to end his pretentious-looking Sean Penn thriller with a dog graphically taking a bullet in the brain.
Making the movie a more story-driven, roman à clef companion piece to the text would be just fine if the movie preserved one crucial element from Linson's book: its wicked tone, the way it captures the Schadenfreude-choked gallows humor Hollywood people use to survive a business that by its nature includes a certain percentage of gambling and failure. But Levinson -- continuing the tone-deafness he exhibited in "Man of the Year" -- keeps the film locked into a sort of low-key middle-aged depression. (Someone uses the phrase "mayonnaise in a sad sandwich" during the course of the story, and it describes the tone perfectly.) There's no deeper sense of Ben's passion or humor, no argument why we should root for him to survive the worst week of his life in the movie business; instead, Levinson just makes that business seem like a relentless, family-destroying downer.
_____
C; 107 minutes; rated R for language, some violent images, sexual content and some drug material.
'What Just Happened?' (The Oregonian, Friday, Oct. 31, 2008)
Comments