SHE’S FUNNY THAT WAY
Forgotten genre returns to cinema
She’s Funny That Way
Back in 2012 I had the pleasure of meeting Peter Bogdanovich, whose storied life would, alas, probably make for a better movie than this one. At the time he told me he was working on a nouveau screwball comedy called Squirrels to the Nuts. Bogdanovich made one of the last great screwball films, 1972’s What’s Up, Doc?
He was 72 when we spoke, and I assumed Squirrels would remain the unfulfilled dream of an aging filmmaker; he hadn’t directed a fiction feature since 2001’s The Cat’s Meow. And yet here it is, renamed She’s Funny That Way and starring everybody. It’s so crammed with talent that Michael Shannon has a walk-on role — you couldn’t even call it a cameo, it’s played so straight — as a Macy’s security guard.
The plot is convoluted yet never confusing, as if the screenplay had been written on origami paper. Owen Wilson plays Arnold Albertson, a Broadway director of such means that he gives a $30,000 tip to a call girl called Izzy, thus turning the tables on the traditional meaning of a happy ending.
Yes, I said call girl, though she prefers the term “muse” and is really only doing it until she can become an “actor.” In addition to not using the term prostitute, the script, by Bogdanovich and his former wife Louise Stratten, features such charming anachronisms as gumshoe, dames and Arthur Miller. By the end of the film I had started a list of other words that could have been inserted seamlessly into the script: VCR. Honky. Charles Grodin.
Izzy is played by British actress Imogen Poots, almost unrecognizable beneath a frizz of hair and a Brooklyn accent as thick as a porterhouse. Her decision to break into acting leads her right back to an audition for Arnold’s newest play, which is problematic because the cast includes his wife (Kathryn Hahn) and his nosy friend (Rhys Ifans). Clearly, the longer Izzy is around, the greater the chance someone will find out the true nature of her day job — that is, her night job.
You could cast two or three additional movies with the supporting players. They include Austin Pendleton as a judge who’s besotted with Izzy; Will Forte as a playwright, also taken in by her charms; Jennifer Aniston as the playwright’s girlfriend and everyone’s therapist; and Richard Lewis and Cybill Shepherd as Izzy’s parents. Additional cast members skulk around, gumshoeing.
Everyone steps up. Wilson is an appealing romantic lead. Poots, who hails from one of the toniest parts of West London, will make you believe she needs that $30,000 just to shift her accent out of Flatbush. And Shannon is great in his security-guard role.
She’s Funny That Way takes its original title from a line in the 1946 comedy Cluny Brown; Bogdanovich is such a gentleman he includes a clip from the film to let us know it wasn’t an original idea. It’s not a great screwball, but it is a charming throwback and a pleasant time-waster — and at 93 minutes, it won’t waste too much.
Had it been produced in the screwball heyday of the 1930s and ’40s, She’s Funny would have ranked as a middling effort. But this isn’t even a case of they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used to. They actually don’t make ‘em. You want nouveau screwball? It’s Bogdanovich or nothing.
She’s Funny That Way opens Aug. 14 in Toronto and Montreal, and on demand.
This isn’t even a case of they-don’t-make’-em-like-they-used to. They actually don’t make ‘em at all