‘Comedy’ unfunny, pretentious
Premise has some promise, but movie doesn’t deliver.
“The Comedy,” one of the most self-indulgent, pretentious and unfunny movies of the year, is a mean-spirited piece of mumblecore that tries to provoke you, but only succeeds in boring you.
Too bad. The premise — an over-the-hill Brooklyn hipster who can’t connect to the world because his sense of entitlement runs amok — showed a lot of promise. So did the first five minutes.
After male-bonding to the extreme (a nude, beer-guzzling romp with his vapid buddies), our antihero Swanson is next seen in his dying father’s room, nursing an alcoholic beverage and taunting a nurse with scatological remarks. It’s appalling, but memorable.
Unfortunately, it all goes downhill from there.
Director/co-writer Rick Alverson doesn’t appear to be interested in making Swanson sympathetic, which is not a bad thing, but the script doesn’t allow his courageous lead actor (Tim Heidecker) to flesh out this pot-bellied ball of anger — and make us remotely care about what happens next.
For the next hour or so, we are subjected to a series of episodic, repetitive and less imaginative set-pieces that may have you checking your watch. A lot.
During this non-story, we are also expected to believe that the slobbish Swanson, who spews slurs that make Archie Bunker seem nuanced, ranks as one of Brooklyn’s biggest babe magnets, which may make you wonder whether the writers are familiar with the female species.
The bottom line is that the filmmakers don’t have a story to tell. Hoping to be provocative, the movie dares us to sit through Swanson’s boorish antics. But in the end, it doesn’t elicit outrage. Just yawns.