Peter Bradshaw in Venice 

She’s Funny That Way: Bogdanovich is back, but the laughs aren’t – review

Peter Bradshaw at the Venice film festival: The director makes his return after 13 years with a musty farce that recalls Woody Allen in a bad way and offers too few good lines to a cast including Imogen Poots as a former prostitute, Owen Wilson her moneybags client and Jennifer Aniston as a psychotherapist
  
  

Imogen Poots and Owen Wilson in She's Funny That Way
Imogen Poots and Owen Wilson in She’s Funny That Way Lionsgate Photograph: Lionsgate

There’s a weird mothbally fragrance to this film by Peter Bogdanovich, co-scripted by him and his ex-wife and producer Louise Stratten, making her screenwriting debut; it is presented out of competition here at the Venice film festival —Bogdanovich’s first feature film as a director for many years.

She’s Funny That Way is a tangly screwball farce with a pile-up of wacky coincidences, a movie set notionally in the Manhattan of the present day, but behaving as if the action is happening in the 1970s or even the 30s, an impression reinforced by ancestor-worship references to the Hollywood Golden Age. There are one or two amiable gags, but it feels musty and dated, with picturesque, golden-hearted hookers embarrassing their well-intentioned clients; there are characters taking what they refer to as “long-distance” telephone calls and screaming fans who surround celebrities with autograph books and pens.

This is the kind of movie that Woody Allen has been making annually for years, and it is bathed in that distinctive orangey-yellow light that you find in the kind of venerable luxury hotel lobby where Allen found locations for movies like Midnight in Paris and To Rome with Love. This is actually so much like a B-grade Woody Allen picture that you might well assume it is a conscious homage specifically to him, rather than to the 1946 Ernst Lubitsch picture Cluny Brown which provides a recurring dialogue motif.

The storyline keeps snagging on its own inconsistencies and infelicities:, which would naturally not matter if there was a supply of real jokes to tide us over. Imogen Poots plays Isabel Patterson, a rather grand movie star giving an interview in which claims that before getting into acting she was a “muse” to various men. She was in fact a call girl, and the flashback narrative makes this quite clear, and there is no obvious comic point to Isabel’s unsustained “muse” imposture or delusion. While doing out-calls to hotels as an escort, Izzy (as she was then known) was doing auditions, and found herself trying out for a big role in a Broadway show: so that is presumably quite some agent she has, though this character never appears.

But the director is none other than Arnold Patterson, played with the unmistakable hesitant drawl by Owen Wilson — a married man who the previous night entertained Izzy in his hotel room. She had been stunned at how wonderful he was as a lover and this romantic sweetheart actually took her out for dinner afterwards and they even had a buggy ride. And then he made an impulsive financial offer to Izzy to encourage her to quit the prostitution business. Was this a crazy menopausal one-off gesture on his part? Apparently not: so apart from everything else he is a loveable prostitute addict who is so fabulously wealthy he can make these staggering gifts of money in a serial manner without anyone noticing.

It turns out that Izzy has another infatuated client, a Judge Prendergast (Austin Pendleton) who actually sees the same psychotherapist, Jane Claremont (Jennifer Aniston), and Jane’s hangdog boyfriend (Will Forte) is actually the author of the play that Izzy’s trying to get into. Meanwhile, Arnold’s wife Delta (Kathryn Hahn) has a thing for the play’s male star Seth, a louche Brit played by Rhys Ifans. From here, the action gets more and more pranged with unexpected chances and twists.

Everything about it seems frankly stale and hand-me-down; there is a lot of shouting, some of it funny, some not, and a fair few star cameos, perhaps called in as favours to a director who has, after all, a genuine claim to have made one of the great movies of the postwar age: The Last Picture Show. Bogdanovitch even awards himself a cameo, glimpsed on TV playing Dr Melfi’s shrink in The Sopranos.

Bogdanovich is a formidable figure, but with this movie he’s just coasting. He surely needs to find a screenplay more attuned to his brilliance, rather than a derivative, low-octane comedy.

 

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