The Extra Man opened the
Independent Film Festival of Boston tonight. It's a comedy based on the novel by Jonathan Ames. Paul Dano plays Louis Ives, a milquetoast who is asked to leave his position as a high school English teacher and decides to move to Manhattan to find himself. He rents a room in a shabby apartment from Henry Harrison (Kevin Kline) who's an eccentric once-promising playwright. Henry has no money but leeches off of high society elder women. Louis gets a job at a magazine and pines for a vegan environmentalist co-worker (Katie Holmes) while trying to resolve his own odd sexual predilections. Dano and Kline are both good but John C. Reilly steals the show as a neighbor with a lot of surprises.
I did laugh quite a bit but I can't say I loved it. Quirky is the easy word, it struck me as Wes Anderson without the melancholy but that doesn't really capture it. While there is a plot, it mostly seems an excuse to crafting a series of vignettes. There are lots of absurdities but little character development.
There was a Q&A afterwards with Kevin Kline and co-director Robert Pulcini. Kline was exactly as I expected him to be and was very funny. Virtually every sentence had a laugh in it and yet he did answer all the questions completely.
No comments:
Post a Comment