Unlike many who’ve reviewed or reacted to I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not (CNN Films), which I wasn’t able to see until last night, I settled into the emotional and psychological aspects with an inclination to (a) not use or reference the ayehole term or (b) use Marina Zenovich’s absorbing, skillfully shaped footage to fortify any contentious or negative opinions I may have stored up about Chase over the decades.
I went into it clean and serene.
In a nutshell, I found it oddly touching. It’s not an indictment piece. It obviously penetrates but not with a scalpel or a machete. It listens, reports, contemplates, empathizes to a certain degree.
And I’ll tell you this: there are few things that give me a greater sense of emotional comfort these days than to know I don’t stand with the scolds…that I’m not a shrieking offense-taker or a hyper-sensitive prosecutor.
Here’s a message I sent to Zenovich around 11:30 pm last night:
Marina — It’s an excellent portrait doc. Very nicely balanced, very even-steven, very humane. Obviously a study of buried pain and bruisings, and a kind of sadness. The gentle piano playing got me; ditto the look of alarm that comes over Chase when told that this or that person has it in for him.
I get people like Chevy, who lives only 14 or so miles from Wilton. I expect a certain brusque callousness…not a problem. So many people are so in love with taking offense, and these are the people, I swear to God, who make life feel so unpleasant.
I always liked Jerry Lewis too, and Lord knows he was no day at the beach. Did I, like Chase, endure a rough, fearful, turbulent childhood? No, but I was certainly miserable throughout much of my tween and teen years. So I feel a certain empathy with people who’ve been dissed and suffocated or, you know, been made to feel morose on some level.