Lack of humour raises eyebrows
Life after Schitt’s Creek no laughing matter for Dan
U‘IT WOULD BE WRONG TO DESCRIBE IT AS JOKE-FREE BUT THERE AREN’T MANY OF THEM’
ntil the wonderful TV comedy series, Schitt’s Creek, came along, I’d barely heard of Dan Levy. His father and co-star, Eugene, he of the unforgettable eyebrows and starring roles in the likes of American Pie, Best In Show and Waiting For Guffman, I obviously knew; but Dan, despite equally memorable eyebrows… not so much. Not at all, in fact.
But six series of the fabulous comedy soon put that right and now here is Levy – Dan, that is, not Eugene, writing, directing and starring in a rather serious film about grief. It would be wrong to describe Good Grief as a joke-free zone but Creek fans beware, there certainly aren’t many of them. Levy plays Marc, an artist and illustrator whose almost annoyingly comfortable life in London’s Notting Hill is brought to a juddering halt by the sudden death of his husband, Oliver (Luke Evans) a writer whose Victoria Valentine novels seem to rival only Harry Potter for sales and movie spin-offs.
But within weeks of Oliver’s death, his American publishers are trying to reclaim his latest advance, while secrets begin to spill out about his unconventional personal life. So while Marc is trying to work out whether he ever really knew the man he loved, we’re trying to work out whether we actually care.
And we don’t… at least not quite enough. Levy’s unusual talent for both appearing to be in the scene and yet also somewhere else altogether is a gift for comedy but less successful when it comes to emotional drama. The saving graces are the supporting performances, including Ireland’s own Ruth Negga and Himesh Patel as the best friends who set out to bully, cajole and love Marc through his grief.
We’ve long had haunted houses but, as far as I know, we’ve never had a haunted swimming pool before, so full marks for originality to Bryce McGuire, who directed and co-wrote, Night Swim, and decent marks for execution too.
For having dreamt up a fundamentally silly idea – a domestic swimming pool awash with both the demonic and the dead – he does at least take the whole thing completely seriously. And, to a limited extent, it works.
I could go on, and McGuire certainly does as ailing baseball star, Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) and his wife, Eve (The Banshees Of Inisherin star Kerry Condon) and children move into their new home… only to discover there’s something nasty lurking in the deep end.
With the likes of Hunt For The Wilderpeople, Jojo Rabbit and Thor: Ragnarok to his name, a new Taika Waititi film is normally something of a cinematic event. But Next Goal Wins feels like he wasn’t really concentrating or possibly caring about it very much either. Telling the story of the American soccer coach who was coerced into coaching American Samoa, once the lowest ranking football nation in the world, it struggles to find a consistent tone, makes one notable ‘comedy’ misjudgement and never really establishes whether its unlikely star, Kerryman Michael Fassbender, can do comedy or not. More own goal than next goal.