Movie Review: 'The Comedian'
By Bill Wine
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- It's called The Comedian, but it's not a comedy.
It's more of a tragedy, but not intentionally.
The Comedian stars Robert De Niro as Jackie Burke, an insult comic/standup comedian trying to regain his vanishing glory.
Jackie once starred in a successful television situation comedy. Consequently, all the audience wants from him are the catch phrases from that gig delivered by Jackie himself, in the flesh.
This does not, as you can imagine, sit well with Jackie, who is, after all, an insult comic.
And one day he assaults a heckler with his microphone and ends up sentenced to a month in jail and then a stretch of forced community service, where he meets Harmony, played by Leslie Mann.
Like Jackie, Harmony, who is considerably younger than him, has anger management issues of her own.
So they bond.
We, however, do not.
Veteran director Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman, Against All Odds, Everybody's All-American, Dolores Claiborne, The Devil's Advocate, Proof of Life, Ray), operating at the bottom of his game, wastes a skilled cast.
Leslie Mann transcends the material and maintains her dignity, but among the underemployed ranks are Danny DeVito as Jackie's brother, Patti Lupone as Jackie's sister-in-law, Harvey Keitel as Mann's father, Edie Falco as his manager, as well as Charles Grodin, Billy Crystal, and Cloris Leachman, among others.
There are actually a number of real comedians delivering snippets and one-liners from their acts. But because the narrative is so strained, each comedian's cameo makes you want to see and hear more of it rather than returning to the central story and the unpleasant main character.
It's not a surprise to learn that the screenplay is by Art Linson, Jeffrey Ross, Richard LaGravenese, and Lewis Friedman, from a story by Linson, because the film unfolds like a committee-conjured concoction no one wants to claim.
But it is a surprise to learn that this was a long-in-development passion project of De Niro's, given that chief among the myriad problems is De Niro's monumental miscasting: he is thoroughly unconvincing as a standup comic, a misanthrope in whom we have absolutely no emotional investment.
We've come a long way – the wrong way -- from Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy, in which De Niro played the unforgettable wannabe standup comic, Rupert Pupkin.
Perhaps the clearest signal of this forced and awkward and largely unwatchable film's wrongheadedness is its reliance on the cheapest laughs imaginable: obscenities mouthed by children and senior citizens.
And a third-act sequence in a Florida retirement home is so poorly judged and in such embarrassingly bad taste, it makes your skin crawl.
From start to finish, take away jokes not landing and drama that's not involving and you're left with startlingly little, a sadly, bafflingly unpleasant ordeal to sit through that comes up woefully short as a character study, as a romance, and as a peek behind the comedy curtain.
So we'll heckle 1 star out of 4 for the hard-to-stomach The Comedian, a cringe-worthy dramedy that botches its take on comedy, mostly because antihero De Niro gets a zero.
