SCOTT AN OVERNIGHT SUCCESS
Life after Parks and Recreation
Adam Scott didn’t have time to mourn the loss of his role in Parks and Recreation after the demise of the sitcom. He was too distracted by movie jobs.
At Christmas, the 43-year-old will be featured with Toni Collette in the fantasy comedy thriller Krampus. In September, he costars opposite Johnny Depp and Benedict Cumberbatch in the crime drama Black Mass.
He will be showcased in the R-rated comedy Sleeping with Other People out later in the summer and he’s already been part of the ensemble for the farce Hot Tub Time Machine 2.
Scott’s latest film project has him keeping it in the family. He headlines the sexy romp The Overnight, now in theatres, with his wife Naomi serving as producer.
It was a project they couldn’t refuse after friend and independent filmmaker Mark Duplass sent them the screenplay.
“We loved it,” says Scott, in Toronto promoting The Overnight. “We were looking for something small and contained to do, and it fit the bill for that, and it was really funny.”
In the film, Scott plays Alex, who moves from Seattle to Los Angeles with his wife Emily (played by Taylor Schilling from Orange is the New Black) and their tiny tot.
When the new-in-town couple set up a play date with the child of Kurt (Jason Schwartzman) and his sexy French wife Charlotte (Judith Godreche), the newcomers finally feel connected.
After the kids get tucked in for the night, however, things get a little odd in a partner-swapping kind of way — which leads to a lot of shenanigans and some male frontal nudity.
The part is in stark contrast to Scott’s more modest moves as Ben in Parks and Recreation, but the latest movie role wasn’t meant as a career transition.
“I always try to find something a bit different,” the actor says, “but it wasn’t a conscious effort.”
He did have to gird his loins for some of the sequences requiring more revealing moments, though.
“Those kinds of things are bound to give you pause, certainly,” Scott says. “A lot of the stuff we had to do ended up being easier to do than I thought it would be.”
It helped, too, that The Overnight was shot over 10 nights and two days, so the cast and crew didn’t have time to become anxious over some of the more risqué scenes.
“Doing it running and gunning like that makes you focus on doing it right, and it helped that everybody was game before we started,” he says.
They needed to be. The film was shot on a shoestring budget.
Just when you thought mumblecore was dead, Duplass Brothers Productions comes roaring back (but quietly — rustling back) with another low-key, barely feature-length comedy designed to push our collective envelope of edginess and prudery.
In 2009, Mark Duplass starred in Humpday, a comedy about two straight men who decide to have sex on film as an art project. In 2010, Mark and brother Jay directed Cyrus, about an adult with an uncomfortably close attachment to his mother.
The Overnight feels a bit like these — certainly the whiff of inappropriate sexual attraction is there in the story of straitlaced parents Alex and Emily (Adam Scott, Taylor Schilling), newly arrived in Los Angeles, who accept a dinner invitation from a cool dad they meet at the park.
Kurt (Jason Schwartzman) gives off a weird vibe that most of us have come across before. Voluble, jokey and opinionated, he might just be Alex and Emily’s new best friend. Or he might merely prove to be a useful source of information on neighbourhood schools. Or he might reveal some secret desire to sell them a time share. Or he might be worse than that.
Audiences will find out which when Alex and Emily show up at Kurt’s palatial residence, which contains (in no particular order) a clothing-optional swimming pool, a well-stocked kitchen, an art studio filled with the kind of paintings Georgia O’Keeffe might have knocked off is she’d been a dude, a bong, and Kurt’s sexy French wife, Charlotte, played by Judith Godrèche. Charlotte is an actress, sort of. And no, she’s not a porn actress. Not exactly.
It’s one of those evenings that starts off with just a hint of impropriety — “you guys smoke pot, right?” — and ends up with just a hint of propriety: “I’ve got a proposal to make ...” Alex and Emily ( but especially Alex) are desperate not to come across as too square, and make polite noises when Kurt describes his water-filtration business, and again when he brings out a DVD of his wife’s work.
Early in the evening, the kids — each couple has a boy of about eight — are put to bed upstairs as the adults move from basic chitchat into more personal and risky realms of conversation. Alex, it turns out, has some major body issues that reveal themselves — first psychologically, then physically — when Kurt invites everyone to go skinny-dipping.
Writer-director Patrick Brice does a good job of keeping us in Alex and Emily’s heads, and out of Kurt and Charlotte’s, who remain something of a mystery even unto the final scenes. But it’s at this point that the over-cranked narrative starts to show signs of stress. We may be able to believe that Kurt’s invention can make pee potable, or even that someone of U.S. birth might allow himself to say “Frawnce” instead of “Frantz” when referring to Charlotte’s homeland.
But the film promises more than it can ultimately deliver. Brice’s screenplay, clever and occasionally funny and sometimes even shocking across the film’s first hour, can’t quite bring the picture home, with the result that some of the climactic scenes don’t ring true. It’s the tyranny of high expectation, and it can strike just as easily in a movie as at a dinner party.