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Weekend Watch is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better.
What to Stream This Weekend
Movie: A Futile and Stupid Gesture
Director: David Wain
Starring: Will Forte, Domhnall Gleeson, Emmy Rossum, Thomas Lennon, Joel McHale, Jackie Tohn
Available on: Netflix
There’s an impenetrability to the kind of humor historically favored by the National Lampoon. It’s arch and immature and offensive and if you don’t like it, well, that’s the point, then, isn’t it? The influence of the Lampoon is all over the last 40 years of American comedy, from movies like Animal House and Caddyshack to Saturday Night Live, to a generation of comedians (mostly men) under its influence, from Judd Apatow to Wet Hot American Summer‘s David Wain. That it’s Wain who is directing this fictionalized version of the story behind the Lampoon, and in particular creator Doug Kenney, is fascinating in a few ways. Wain’s movies have a similar high-arch quality and attract a loyal band of lunatic actors, but they’ve also represented a kind of evolution of that Harvard brand of comedy. That Wain, and co-writers John Aboud and Michael Colton, themselves former editors of the Harvard Lampoon, so obviously reveres Kenney and the Lampoon brand is evident in the care he puts into the film and limiting in the ways the movie surrenders itself to Kenney’s comedic wavelength.
Wain cast Will Forte to play Kenney, which is genius in that Forte is a phenomenally talented and underrated actor who has it in him to play the layers of arch comedy necessary. Just watch Alexander Payne’s Nebraska followed by a quick binge of the FOX comedy The Last Man on Earth for a peek into Forte’s vast array of talents. Wain appears to have cast Forte primarily for his gift at being spectacularly, almost preternaturally aloof. Kenney is both a Harvard know-it-all and a chip-on-his-shoulder comedic anarchist who co-founds the Lampoon mostly to thumb his nose at … well, everyone. Stuffy Harvard classmates, his crisp suburbanite parents who don’t seem to like him very much, the middlebrow taboos of American life, the Nixon administration, whomever. As depicted in A Futile and Stupid Gesture, Kenney’s primary comedic gift appears to be his willingness to dive head-first into bad taste and emerge with something that will elicit laughter amid the shocked gasps.
Wain surrounds Kenney with the major figures from his life and career, many of them beloved American comedic icons, almost all of them played by familiar faces. There’s Domhnall Gleeson playing Henry Beard, the National Lampoon co-founder and archness personified, with his affected blazers and pipe, reading a book while food fights rain down around him. Gleeson looks like he just wandered in from a unsuccessful audition to play Billie Jean King in Battle of the Sexes, but he brings a steady, deadpan hand to Forte’s antics. They make for a fun pair, and the film suffers when Gleeson’s not around. Elsewhere, Kenney’s relationships with most of the early SNL players means we get a lot of them around, including Chevy Chase (played by Joel McHale in a more-than-winking nod to Community‘s on-set strife), Gilda Radner (GLOW‘s Jackie Tohn), John Belushi (John Gemberling), and Bill Murray (Jon Daly). That’s a lot of comedic potential, and they’re also the biggest problem you’re going to have with A Futile and Stupid Gesture: how does a movie with this many funny people playing this many funny people about the process of making this much funny art, in a movie directed by an incredibly funny director end up so incredibly devoid of laughter? It’s genuinely shocking how un-funny this movie is, and how smug its overly clever narrative devices are.
Part of the problem seems to be that the intended audience doesn’t appear to be us but rather anyone who doubted Doug and the Lampoon. There’s a note of smug triumph that keeps getting played, and the repetition of said note is wearying. Folks, I wasn’t even alive for Animal House, so I wasn’t the one doubting it would be the #1 comedy of all time, so stop doing these touchdown dances in front of me and make a funny movie for God’s sake.
This is a movie that very much wants to be Man on the Moon, the 1999 Jim Carrey vehicle where he played impenetrable comedic icon Andy Kaufman. Only David Wain isn’t Milos Forman. Wain is funnier than Milos Forman and has made several films that are better than several Forman films, but they’re not playing in the same sandbox, and when Wain attempts to go all meta and step outside the text, the result is just one more moment that isn’t funny in a comedy that feels intent on withholding itself from its audience. The better option might be to just stream Jim & Andy and Wet Hot American Summer back-to-back, then shake your brain vigorously until they’re both mixed together in your mind. You’ll probably end up with a migraine, but you’ll stand a better chance of cracking a smile too.
