Road to nowhere
David Brent’s back – and he’s better than ever
Dir Ricky Gervais
Starring Ricky Gervais, Doc Brown, Tom Basden, Tom Bennett, Andy Burrows, Steve Clarke, Michael Clarke, Stuart Wilkinson, Diane Morgan
It would be unfair, and also a bit insulting, to say The Office worked because Ricky Gervais and David Brent are one and the same man. But in the 13 years since that landscape-shifting sitcom – the acid-bath of his Golden Globes hosting stint here, two hectoring series of Derek there, the celebrity lampoon that was Extras somewhere in the middle – it’s become obvious that this particular creatorcharacter relationship is a once-in-alifetime love match. A Gervais joke that lands and a Brent one that doesn’t are basically indistinguishable. The only difference is the former takes a hatchet to the mood on purpose.
After his recent tirades about comedy and offensiveness on social media, I’m not entirely convinced Gervais understands the intricate comic mechanisms that make Brent work – but then eight-year-old Mozart couldn’t transcribe musical notation when he wrote his first symphony.
All of which means that Gervais’s decision to bring back Brent for one more feature-length go-around doesn’t in any way feel like a retreat. Since we last saw him, this astonishingly plausible creation – now a middle-aged and largely friendless sanitary products rep at Lavichem – has 10 more years of unfulfilled dreams in the tank, and David Brent: Life on the Road gleefully burns through them in toe-twistingly funny fashion.
Even after all these years, the character still fits Gervais as comfortably as a Sergio Georgini sports jacket. (The return of the embarrassing leather coats, along with “ipso facto” and Fray Bentos, are as close as the film gets to reheating old jokes.) There’s also an excruciating new addition to Brent’s arsenal of comic tics – a kind of strangulated, ingratiating groan from the back of the throat that’s pure mid-life desperation distilled into a single squeak.
The plot sees Brent embarking on a vanity rock-and-roll tour, made possible by taking 11 days’ unpaid leave and cashing in his various pensions. His backing band, Foregone Conclusion, are made up of a bunch of reluctant session musicians and Dom Johnson (Doc Brown), an aspiring rapper Brent pretends to manage while using as a token black friend to shore up his non-existent progressive credentials.
But Brent’s road trip turns out to be even more stifling than his nine-to-five job – daisy-chaining its way along an interminable series of Home Counties business hotels, each one with narrower beds and harder-wearing carpets than the last. There is a luxuriantly sad running joke about just how parochial the tour actually is and how much it’s costing Brent to pull off. Plus it’s shot in the same ash-tinted, glamourless visual style as The Office.
“Sold my shack in Memphis / Bought me a Chev-eh-roh-lay / Sixstring in the back and a bottle of Jack / And I headed down Mexico way,” Brent sings with Springsteenian conviction, while he pulls off the M25 in his lead grey Vauxhall Insignia. (The songs, with names like Lady Gypsy and Equality Street, owe much to the faux folk of the 2003 mockumentary A Mighty Wind, directed by Gervais’s mentor Christopher Guest.)
If Gervais was working with more resources here than he was 13 years ago, there’s zero evidence of it on screen. Happily, what’s in no short supply is the same mix of uproarious failure and sledgehammer pathos that Brent at his best was always all about. It’s unmistakably The David Brent Show, rather than The Office Movie: the minutely calibrated chemistry of the show’s ensemble cast is missing, with no Gareth, Tim or Dawn equivalents, and a Chris Finch surrogate, ‘Jezza’ (Andrew Brooke) who doesn’t get nearly enough screen time for his spite to really bite.
But Tom Bennett, the breakout star of Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship, rides a delicious tragi-preposterous groove as Nigel, Brent’s only male friend at Lavichem, Tom Basden’s permanently fed-up road manager Dan is an asset in his every scene, and Doc Brown’s Dom has a look of paralysed dismay whenever Brent ties himself in knots over issues of race that repeatedly bring the house down. (In a reflective moment, he describes his friendship with Brent as “what the dreads in UB40 have been going through for years”.)
Poignancy blooms in strange places. A scene in which Brent repeatedly uses the N-word aims impossibly at tenderness – and hits. A certain piece of sentimental stagecraft at a Christmas gig is carefully built up as a disappointment-in-waiting, and so it proves – though it also draws real tears, honestly earned.
At the close of one of the most underwhelming summers at the cinema in recent memory, it’s weirdly fitting that an anticlimax should be the thing to bring the house down.