Sundance: 'Entertainment' is a Twisted Misfire
Monday, January 26, 2015 at 12:14AM Michael C here reporting from Park City
The failing comedian at the center of Rick Alverson's Entertainment performs as if he loathes the very idea of humor. He flings his hackneyed one-liners at disinterested barflies with a disdain that aims to wound, not amuse. His appearance mocks the very idea of a comic, a slouched caricature of failure who takes the stage in a cheap tuxedo with a microphone and a vodka in one hand and three more vodkas cradled in his other arm. His desperate combover is pasted to his head giving the appearance of permanent flop sweat. It would be surprising to learn that he has genuinely laughed in years...
Anyone who saw Alverson's The Comedy will not be surprised to see just how far the writer/director is willing to go in making his characters unlikeable. That film was a lacerating dissection of the most insufferable Brooklyn hipster on Earth, and I admired its sharp, unsparing eye and fearlessness enough to put it on my top ten in 2012. Entertainment explores similarly brutal terrain, following the man who very well be the worst comedian in America on a tour of the absolute pits of what can technically be called show business, but it pains me to report his follow up is a big step down.
It's difficult to pinpoint exactly why exactly this film is inert to the same degree The Comedy was electric. Both engage in a game of brinksmanship with the audience, testing the limits of how much aggressive unpleasantness they are willing to endure. Maybe its because underneath it all The Comedy held out a measure of pity for its protagonist, even some lingering shred of hope in its cleansing final scene. Entertainment has no such soul. It regards its hero (played with admirable commitment by Gregg Turkington) as if he were a specimen under a jar in a museum of oddities. When he is not onstage spewing his bile he has the single comatose expression of someone who is seconds away from stepping in front of a train. He has the makings of a great sketch character but at feature length he amounts to a miserable lifeless prop. Tony Clifton without Andy Kaufman underneath snickering at the joke of it all.
Alverson attempts to compensate for the lack of human interest by doubling down on the discomforting button pushing, but once we learn his audience alienating tricks the film lapses into repetition to diminishing returns. Scenes will end abruptly without reaching a point, performances will go beyond deadpan into the merely dead, and any opportunity to dwell on gratuitous ugliness will be seized. A gory late-in-the-film encounter with a pregnant woman in a dirty public restroom feels like a particularly desperate attempt to provoke some reaction, any reaction out of the viewer.
Still, even if the film is a swing and a miss, you still have to tip your hat to the tremendous force with which Alverson wields the bat. Not only because he is resolutely uncompromising with a vision he must know will doom him with 99% of audiences, but also for his endless supply of hypnotic images like Turkington posed in a vast desert expanse or dreaming himself a garishly dressed cowboy in a jail cell. I'm glad Alverson is out there pushing the boundaries. In Entertainment he tries to chart the bottomless emptiness a human life. He found the emptiness, all that's missing is the human life.
Grade: C-
Reader Comments (2)
Despite of this movie lacking anything that would make me memorize its content for more than one week from watching it, it still has this kind of truthfulness that you can understand only when visiting a bad comedy club. But I totally agree that this movie lacks almost everything - good acting, interesting plot, believable scenes etc...
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