Ever hear a dorky guy trying to tell a dirty joke? It’s awkward. For everyone involved. That’s how I felt watching cerebral director Atom Egoyan telling this tale of celebrity sordidness — he of the lyrical Sweet Hereafter and sexually repressed Exotica. He’s one of film’s nice guys and his take on the rotten core at the center of fame cannot hide its very earnest sense of moral outrage. The embodiment of that morally virginal disapproval is main character Karen O’Connor.
The complicated (yet oddly simplistic plot) begins when Karen was a little girl with polio who appeared on a telethon alongside her hero Lanny Morris and his partner Vince Collins. They host the annual 7-hour extravaganza that seems designed as much to elicit empathy for its hosts as it is to raise money for the disease. Think Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin — and more specifically Lewis’ bathetic Labor Day misery exhibitions that once signaled the sad end of summer. Kevin Bacon as the Lewis figure is thankfully restrained and plausible but the character isn’t compelling enough. Colin Firth as the other half of the duo is a strange choice. Yes, he may convey Dean’s detached elegance but he’s no song-and-dance man.
Casting afflictions aside the film suffers other crippling credibility lapses. The painfully innocent voiceover narration from Karen, now a reporter investigating the mysterious death of a woman in the duo’s hotel years ago, is embarrassing. The premise has promise but in Egoyan’s hands the temporal jumps, period musical montages and voiceovers feel like a Martin Scorsese Goodfellas karaoke.
The explicitness of some of the sex scenes seems to have caused a ratings stir, and yeah, there’s some steaminess, but the drug-induced orgy plays out like an ambitious B-movie. And like much of this well-meaning picture, I wasn’t buying it.
Opens October 14 at Landmark Sunshine
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