Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has called Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? (Searchlight, 12.19), which I saw last night at Alice Tully Hall, “a feel-good divorce film”.
That’s a fairly accurate description — it’s a kinder, warmer, far-less-hostile Marriage Story, and the general behavioral drift is amiable. It’s superbly acted all around, but it also has a bit of a flabby belly. For my money it’s way too happy, too mellow, too easygoing, too turn-the other-cheek. No real conflict, no real challenges, no “drama”, no heavy pivots.
Set in the flush environs of Manhattan’s West Village and a handsome home in Westchester County, it’s mainly about Alex and Tess (Will Arnett and Laura Dern), a 40ish husband and wife with two ten-year-old boys (they’re called “Irish twins” due to having been born less than a year apart).
The key situation is that Alex and Tess have decided to call it quits because…well, because they’ve been written this way. The dramatic engine, if you will, is basically about Alex dipping his toe into the waters of Manhattan stand-up comedy as a form of therapy, using his personal saga for material. It’s also about personal renewal.
But the film, directed and co-written by Cooper, is also about gliding and sliding and loping along without pushing any of the usual emotionally fraught buttons.
It’s obvious early on that Cooper has decided to steer clear of Noah Baumbach territory and the usual “we’re getting divorced and boy, it’s pretty hard to do this with kids”, not to mention zero interest in the usual dramatic devices and considerations (lawyers, alimony, etc.)
But mainly it reminded me of a French ensemble relationship dramedy, except these French films (we’ve all seen dozens over the decades) tend to throw in more in the way of plot surprises, goofball humor, narrative curve balls.
For those who haven’t had the repeated pleasure, French ensemble relationship movies are defined by their complex, character-driven narratives that explore the messy, intertwined lives of a group of friends or family.
I can’t imagine anyone hating or even disliking Is This Thing On?, but it’s not meaty or nervy or risky enough to inspire anything more than easy smiles and shoulder–shrugs.
Is This Thing On? is the kind of film that a loaded, well liked actor-director makes when he has several reasons to be feel pumped and happy about things…a guy who feels abundantly massaged and tickled by his more-or-less fantastic life.
Compare Cooper’s film with another NYC dramedy about four highly perceptive, financially comfortable, middle-aged marrieds coping with divorce — Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives. That 1992 film has always been aces on its own terms, but compared to Is This Thing On? it’s an earth-shaking Chekhovian classic.
It’s worth noting that Alex and Tess are living flush, bordering-on-financially-opulent lives without the movie even glancing for a split second at where all this money-from-heaven is coming from. (Alex, we’re told, is in “finance”…pretty vague.)
Alex’s reasonably spacious West Village pad rents for, I’m guessing, at least $6K or $7K a month, if not more. Compare Alex’s living situation (he owns a car and probably pays $1500 or $2K a month for the garage-space rental, and yet, early on, he doesn’t want to pay a $15 cover charge at the comedy cellar)…compare Alex’s place to Chris Evans’ appallingly grungy Brooklyn-bro share or even Dakota Johnson’s slightly modest 1 bdr. apartment in Materialists.
If Arnett and Dern were in their early to mid 40s, it would be one thing in terms of the lore of Alan J. Pakula‘s Starting Over (’79) and middle-aged crazy and hormonal activity and whatnot. But Arnett is 55 and looks it (dyed hair, salt-and-pepper whiskers, not rail thin) and Dern is 58.
That said, I reveled in one of the most vigorous and glorious sexual affairs of my life when I was past my 50s so who am I to talk, right?
Gleiberman: “It’s an observant, bittersweet, and highly watchable movie, yet there’s a softness to it, a slightly pandering quality. It’s like a James L. Brooks movie with hipper camerawork. Arnett, who has the look and demeanor of a less energized Michael Keaton, is a likable enough actor in a rather mopey way, but he’s done a lot of sitcom work and it shows. Arnett seems, in essence, to be playing Alex as a sitcom dad — sharp-tongued yet benign, lost in his daze of self-interest, with an essential quality of harmlessness that’s the opposite of movie-star danger.”