Caine & Plaza chemistry make ‘Best Sellers’ a must-watch
Can anyone have anticipated a scenario in which Michael Caine and Aubrey Plaza play a variation of “The Odd Couple”?
In the small, gem-like, screwball comedy “Best Sellers,” Plaza plays Lucy Stanbridge, a young, rich, well-educated woman who inherits a venerable New York publishing house from her father. The house is in trouble and on the verge of being sold off at a loss to former executive Jack Sinclair (Scott Speedman), who was once romantically involved with Lucy, although things have chilled down.
Lucy and her wryly funny assistant Rachel Spence (an indispensable Ellen Wong) are desperate to find a best seller to publish to save the company. The only candidate they come up with is Harris Shaw (Michael Caine), who hasn’t published a book in 50 years. But his first and only effort, “Atomic Autumn,” which Lucy’s father supposedly carefully edited, was a smash hit, and an old contract confirms that Harris owes them a book. The set-up is simple, elegant and full of potential.
Directed by first-time feature filmmaker and actor Lina Roessler, “Best Sellers” has the nerve to open to the sound of someone pounding on a typewriter, something some people in the audience might not recognize. Harris, an old, angry geezer and widower, picks up a ringing phone and spews the words, “He’s dead; bugger off,” into it and hangs up. We see him type the words THE END at the bottom of a page. We learn something of Harris’s background. He was “thrown out of Ireland” and lives in Westchester, N.Y. (the film was shot in Quebec). He’s a “drunk, a recluse and a madman.” His house faces imminent foreclosure.
Thus, he is persuaded by Lucy to go on a book tour to promote “The Future is X-Rated,” his newest effort, a bleak, “Children of Men”-type, extinction-level work of dystopiana. But instead of reading from the book, Shaw, who shares his name with a certain Anglo-Irish playwright and polemicist, scandalously reads a missive from the letter section of a 1977 issue of Penthouse Magazine. Harris catchphrase “It’s all bullshite” is trending. Twitter loves the curmudgeon.
Lucy, who has to learn to drive Shaw’s oddly reliable, right-hand drive vintage Jaguar, goes on the road, touring dive bars with the old man, who sits in the back of the Jag, smoking cigars and dozing. It’s clear that as much as she disapproves of Shaw’s outrageous behavior, Lucy grows increasingly fond of him.
Caine, 88, has a blast acting like the most scandalous member of the Sex Pistols. Plaza, a gifted comic actor with a razor-sharp. sarcastic screen presence, has not had this sort of chemistry with a male colleague, maybe ever. For his part, Caine does very little outside of talking to his beloved dead wife, to make Shaw likable.
Actor-screenwriter Anthony Grieco sticks to the rules of the traditional screwball comedy. But instead of a romance, he gives us a surrogate father-daughter bond. Shaw rubs off on Lucy, and she becomes more and more like the old man, chanting, “It’s all bullshite,” with the hipsters at the bars, enjoying long swigs of neat Johnnie Walker Black Label and smoking the old man’s cigars. Later, she will quote his favorite lines from “The Great Gatsby.” Apparently, these two were meant for each other. But their “romance” has little future.
That’s the Kinks performing “Last of the Steam-Powered Trains” over the final credits, a suitable send-off for this very pleasant surprise.
(“Best Sellers” contains profanity, drunkenness and a scene in which someone pees on a burning book.)