This morning I flew through a deliciously written N.Y. Times Magazine profile of War Dogs star Jonah Hill (“Jonah Hill Is No Joke“). I’ve met Hill three or four times and regard him as one of “HE’s own,” and it’s my humble opinion that Young, a 20something, has captured him well and fairly. Young is obviously sharp and attuned and knows how to sculpt sentences like a samurai.
(l.)
War Dogs star and
N.Y. Times Magazine object-of-scrutiny Jonah Hill (r.)
Times profiler Molly Young.
I’ve pasted some excerpts but first consider Young’s assessment of War Dogs (Warner Bros., 8.19), which opens in two weeks and which no one I know has seen yet:
“Nobody has bulletproof judgment,” Young begins — that in itself tells you everything. Then she says that Hill’s portrayal of real-life arms dealer Efraim Diveroli “could be seen as a terrific character in an otherwise okay movie. It’s not that War Dogs isn’t funny; and it’s not as if [director] Todd Phillips has made a buddy-cop comedy about Ferguson, but it is an Iraq War movie made by the director of The Hangover. There are strippers and an underwritten supportive-girlfriend role and Bradley Cooper.”
If Hill had been profiled by Vanity Fair, no way would they have allowed their writer to describe War Dogs as “okay,” let alone damn with faint praise with the Ferguson analogy. No way. This is the difference between a serious writer filing for a publication with a semblance of integrity and a once-respected, kiss-ass monthly.
Young/Hill excerpt #1: “The hilarious-sidekick roles make up a numerically small but neon-bright portion of Hill’s career, and no number of contrasting performances — in indie comedies directed by the Duplass brothers, in Oscar-nominated dramas like Moneyball — can seem to override the public impression of him as a man who might, at any moment, start humping the furniture.”
Young/Hill excerpt #2: “If Superbad cemented Hill’s status as an entertaining accent piece, Moneyball suggested that pegging him as a novelty actor was an error. His character in that movie, an economics geek named Peter Brand, is an introvert who walks the earth as if he’s about to be pantsed. He underplays the part so deftly that Brand’s emotional climax — when he sees that his methods actually work — is conveyed by no more than a few euphoric seconds of rapid blinking and a half-smile.”
