Crystal, Haddish can’t save strained so-called ‘comedy’
Back in 1989, Nora Ephron, in her film When Harry Met Sally, posed the age-old question: Can men and women ever really be friends? Now, thirty-two years later, Billy Crystal, who played the titular Harry, returns in Here Today to tell us that not only can men and women be friends, but that their friendship can yield an uninteresting, unfunny movie. Call this one When Charlie Met Snooze
Crystal plays Charlie, a playwright and longtime writer for a Saturday Night Live-type sketch show called This Just In. He also directs here, and Charlie’s profession makes sense, considering Crystal co-wrote the screenplay with former Saturday Night Live writer Alan Zweibel, based on Zweibel’s short story “The Prize”. The film follows Charlie’s growing friendship with Emma (Tiffany Haddish), a singer who meets Charlie via her ex-boyfriends’ charity auction bid, and initially only wants to make her ex, a fan of Charlie’s, jealous. But the pair take a liking to each other, and soon become inseparable, and yes, platonic BFFs (because maybe the thirty-two year age difference between Crystal and Haddish is finally too icky even for Hollywood!?). The film’s New York cinematography and style actually are slightly reminiscent of Ephron’s classic, but that only serves to remind us that we’re watching an inferior product.
While the movie gets some credit for portraying a cross-generational, cross-racial, and cross-gender friendship, the problem is that the picture just isn’t funny, despite what the misleading trailer and the casting of two comedians — one established and seasoned and one younger and au courant — would lead you to believe. Make no mistake: this film is no comedy. The film’s central premise concerns Charlie’s slow slide into dementia and his lingering guilt from a tragic accident years ago. Anyone expecting the edgy laughs of Haddish’s acclaimed Girls Trip will be sorely disappointed here. The film actually plays more like the Julianne Moore Alzheimer picture Still Alice, only more maudlin and over the top.
Ultimately, that’s the picture’s problem: tonally, it’s all over the map. Crystal and Zweibel try to offer up some funny moments, but any time Haddish and Crystal share a laugh together, they seem forced and unnatural. And the sketches from Charlie’s variety show that we witness being workshopped are beyond cringeworthy. Yet the show’s writers and, later, its audience, laugh uproariously, while we’re left wondering, what’s so funny about a character named Thomas Crapper, who has the only toilet in his Victorian era neighborhood. That’s the level of comedy we’re dealing with here. The film’s opening, too, in which Emma has an especially extreme reaction to seafood, is a joyless broad moment of physical comedy that not only is humorless, but also jarringly out of place, given the wide thematic turn that the picture takes shortly thereafter.
The film’s only mildly funny bit results from Crystal and Zweibel clearly using their Hollywood clout to get some big names to play themselves. Bob Costas, Sharon Stone, Kevin Kline, and director Barry Levinson are in an inspired scene involving an anniversary screening of a well-received film Charlie penned years ago. The scene gently pokes fun at the pretension of such screenings, and the movie as a whole could have benefited from more such sly, smart ribbing. Instead, we mostly get random scenes that feel like tossed away variety show sketch ideas themselves. Charlie and Emma go to a wax museum, for example, and hilarity fails to ensue: Charlie imitates the voices of the famous statues, while Haddish, as Emma, stands by and laughs stiltedly. It’s painful to watch.
These set pieces contrast strangely with the picture’s more serious themes of Charlie’s increasing memory loss, and his tense relationship with his son Rex (Penn Badgley) and daughter Francine (Laura Benanti). Flashbacks to Charlie’s relationship with their mother (Louisa Krause) also pile another layer of melodrama onto the proceedings, adding to the sense that Crystal and Zweibel are all over the map with this project. And one of the film’s most cliched and unbelievable scenes wipes away a whole history of familial resentment and anger with just a few sentences from a virtual stranger. That sequence becomes the ultimate eye roll moment in a picture that has more than its fair share of them.
I was intrigued by the pairing of Crystal and Haddish, as I’m sure many comedy and film fans are, too, so the disappointment I felt after this overwrought, awkward picture finally ended was palpable. Crystal and Zweibel’s effort is laudable, but, unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the execution.
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Here Today opens today at select Bay Area theaters.
