A moped is such a sad and silly vehicle to
drive. It may not guzzle gas, but it whines the entire time you ride it, like
Fran Drescher’s The Nanny character drawing out the final syllable of
“Mr. Sheffieeeeeeeeeeeld”—for an entire road trip. It’s a vehicle for dorks,
for those who can’t provide for their family, for those who are creatively (and
maybe physically) constipated. It’s a vehicle for Nate Kroll (Jemaine Clement),
an award-winning playwright whose career has hit the skids, and his marriage
with it.
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| Photo credit: Humor Me/IMDb |
It’s a goofy sight to see Clement’s
Frankenstein’s-monster-sized frame perched atop his character’s moped as he
speeds (maybe “ambles” would be a better word for what this thing does) down
the highway to move into his father’s home in a retirement community in Humor
Me, writer-director Sam Hoffman’s feature debut. As funny as it is to see
the former Flight of the Conchords bassist ride Nate’s vehicle of choice, it’s
even more bizarre to hear the famous Kiwi put on an American accent that
doubles as a pretty spot-on impression of John Malkovich in an especially
morose mood.
Blah Beige Wrung For Laughs
The world Nate enters after his life falls apart
is, as he describes it, “rather beige.” Nate’s technically describing the walls
and decor of his dad, Bob’s (Elliott Gould) cookie-cutter, personality-free new
home, but it’s really about the hazy stupor he finds himself in as an
adrift man who is so allergic to making decisions that he has toiled for four
years on a single play’s script without determining an ending. He’s gotten
pudgy, there are more gray hairs than black atop his head, and he’s only able
to speak with his son (his one joy in life) at 3 a.m. on Skype because his
mother has absconded with a billionaire client to spend a summer in Europe. He
is, as one of Bob’s country club buddies suggests, “blocked.”
So, Humor Me posits, it’s up to Bob and
the rest of his retiree neighbors to unblock his son, to move Nate past his
midlife crisis. Each person in the community has his or her own ideas on how to
shake something productive out of the dreary newcomer. Bob sets the
cash-strapped Nate up with thankless jobs at the community center and tedious
chores around his house. Nate’s short-lived boss at the club wants him to
remain focused on the process of folding towels rather than feeling
above folding towels for money simply because he’s a Harvard grad. Bob’s
girlfriend, Connie (Priscilla Lopez), leans on Nate’s Broadway experience to
rope him into directing a community theatre version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The
Mikado.
Nate bristles at each attempt to make him
better, and Bob bristles right back, seemingly for the first time in their
relationship.
You see, Bob isn’t some domineering old-school
dad. He’s too lighthearted for that. He sneaks away from the health-conscious
Connie to eat microwave burritos in the garage and he tells jokes about his
fictional doppelganger, Zimmerman (played in black-and-white fantasy sequences
by Joey Slotnick), who gets himself into all kinds of hijinks on tropical
islands and in doctors’ offices. Gould uses a ‘50s Vegas showman cadence when
telling his various Zimmerman bits, with a ratatat setup followed by a
groan-worthy punchline that he punctuates with an open-mouthed grin—an
expression screaming out for a rimshot and a few Midwestern tourists choking on
their shrimp in response.
His humor is his way of coping and avoiding
anything that makes him sad. “Life’s gonna happen, son, whether you smile or
not,” he says with a hint of earned wisdom, but in practice he keeps himself
too busy with his knee-jerk humorous responses to everything to truly
acknowledge that unfunny things happen all the time in his life—his too-high
cholesterol, his iffy relationship with his son, his dead wife.
When Hoffman trains his movie on that tension
between a man too depressed to be anything other than a paralyzed, self-serious
bore and a his father who is too wed to his coping mechanism to accept
depression as a viable emotion, Humor Me really clicks as dramedy. But
the movie is too self-conscious to live in that tension for long. Instead, it
leans on a genial and retro style of cinematic comedy that last got American
audiences going in about 1996. It replicates the rhythms of that era’s comedies
like The Birdcage and My Cousin Vinny, with some James L. Brooks
(especially As Good As It Gets) thrown in there for flavor. The jokes go
big and broad, like the black Korean War vet who won’t be lectured on his own
racism toward “bucket heads” (“or Orientals if you prefer”) or the horny old
actress who wishes to become Nate’s mistress. Silly faces abound, each kind of
hacky gag recalling Bob’s own open-mouthed joke delivery—and his avoidance
issues.
Humor Me relies on familiar jokes to keep its primary characters (and
itself) from resolving their deepest issues. It doesn’t want to dwell in an
uncomfortable place, so it wraps itself in the reheated schtick of ‘90s
comedies (both in scene construction and its flat and unimaginative cinematography)
that simply doesn’t taste as fresh the second or third time around. That
doesn’t mean it’s not worth sampling, but it’s not something that you’ll rave
about later. It’s a nice microwave burrito.
Director: Sam Hoffman
Writer: Sam Hoffman
Starring: Jemaine Clement, Elliott Gould, Ingrid
Michaelson, Maria Dizzia, Priscilla Lopez, Joey Slotnick, Annie Potts, Bebe
Neuwirth
Rating: 3/5 stars
Available now on demand in in limited release
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