Life after Schitt’s Creek? It’s no joke
Good Grief Cert: 15, 1hr 40mins Available on Netflix Night Swim Cert: 15, 1hr 38mins Next Goal Wins Cert: 12A, 1hr 44mins
Until 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 and Best In Show, I obviously knew. But Dan, despite equally memorable eyebrows… not so much. Not at all, in fact.
But six series of the fabulous multi-award-winning comedy soon put that right and now here is Levy – Dan, that is, not Eugene – trying to shake off the long shadow of his Schitt’s Creek character, David Rose, and his own Emmy-honed reputation for comedy by 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, and certainly not in anything that could be described as a
Truly, Madly, Deeply way. 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 in emotional drama.
The saving graces are the supporting performances. Ruth Negga and Himesh Patel are good as the best friends who set out to bully, cajole and love Marc through his complicated grief, while a touching David Bradley and Celia Imrie make the most of limited screen time.
We’ve long had haunted houses, dozens of them, along with mansions, barns, cornfields, wells and hotels. 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. This will do his career absolutely no harm at all. 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 – suddenly that nasty overflow looks exactly the sort of place It’s Pennywise might be hiding, while horror fans will know the sinister filter pump at the bottom is where a pretty teen’s long hair might easily get tangled…
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 the distinctly patchy Next Goal Wins feels like he wasn’t really concentrating, or possibly caring about it very much either.
Telling the story of an American soccer coach 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’ misjudgment and never really establishes whether its unlikely star, Michael Fassbender, can do comedy or not. More own goal than next goal.