ben schwartz | stef aside

Peep World

Posted on February 12, 2015 by sll

I remember hearing about this movie when it came out in 2010, and being utterly delighted by the cast: Michael C. Hall, Rainn Wilson, Sarah Silverman, Ben Schwartz (ahem, Benny Schwaz), Kate Mara, Judy Greer, blah blah blah. And then, for some reason, I never actually saw it. Seeing Michael C. Hall on Broadway as Hedwig made me remember it, though, and stream it on Netflix.

I’m glad I did, even though it wasn’t the world’s greatest movie, because it deserves a little love. Four years later, This Is Where I Leave You came out, and OH MY GOD, it’s basically the same movie. Four siblings gathering against their will because their father makes them. There are many differences, mostly minutae, but the similarities are sort of sickening. (Benny is even in both movies!) I’m inclined to be a little mad at TIWILY for getting all the credit, though the book it was based on was published in 2009. Who knows. Either way, the Venn Diagrams of these two movies overlap so much that they’re basically just one circle, and it makes me wince that so many people I love are involved in carbon copies of the same movie. Then again, I guess this is just a Friends With Benefits/No Strings Attached type of situation. Oy.

Yes, oy. Peep World is also about a Jewish family. While the quality of this movie, production-wise, was much lower, I think it took itself far less seriously and covered much less ground than Peep World, giving it more points in my book. It also didn’t indulge its actors and let them depend heavily on their previously-established comedic talents. Michael C. Hall, playing the sort-of Corey Stoll character, doesn’t often get to be a normal guy with normal problems. Here, he was. He got to sit back and be the boring guy, and even though that wasn’t entirely believable (because he’ll always have a sparkle in his eye), he’s always had a calm about him that makes him truly magnetic onscreen. And watching him slowly boil, only to lash out at his father very eloquently, was worth it. Rainn Wilson, not the youngest but definitely in the Adam Driver role, got the chance to be a slob. A real slob, too, and a fuck-up. One that has nothing in common with his cleaned-up, thoughtful real life personality, or the OCD quality that most of his television characters tend to have. Even cooler, he and MCH kind of looked like they could be real brothers.

Sarah Silverman, playing the Tina Fey role and thus the lone woman, acted the hell out of this. She deserves much more credit than she ever gets for how truthful she can be on screen. She plays crazy well, yes, but even more than that, she has the ability to say what no one else could, with no one else’s timing, and in no one else’s tone. I can’t wait to see her do more non-comedic stuff, because she’s going to kill it. Benny probably had the most in common with Jason Bateman’s role, in that he was the focal sibling of the bunch. (He and Sarah also look like siblings!) The difference is that Peep World is the name of the book that his character, Nathan, wrote about his whole family, thus revealing all their secrets and causing a lot of resentment. There’s an air of Six Feet Under black comedy in this story, too, and not just because of MCH, but because Brenda and Billy Chenowith grew up with the world knowing about their childhood after their mother published a book about it. The family airs their grievances at one dinner, specifically because of the book, and thus the plot has more focus. In TIWILY, the movie got lost in explaining years of backstory, because the family gathering took place over a week and introduced way too many side characters to keep up with.

Speaking of side characters: Kate Mara played Nathan’s publicist. Taraji P. Henson played Joel’s (Wilson) girlfriend. Greer played Jack’s (Hall) wife. Lewis Black narrated the whole thing, in maybe his most tolerable role to date. I’m getting exhausted just thinking about it. Ensemble casts like this just don’t work out the way you think they will. Even though I think this movie was a little better than TIWILY, both were still overwhelming. And both are discouraging me from ever seeing August: Osage County. Watching another family sort out its problems is not exactly something movie-goers want to do. We all have our own family problems to deal with, after all. Peep World, unfortunately, contains a lot of great parts, but the sum of ’em isn’t so great.

This Is Where I Leave You

Posted on September 28, 2014 by sll

The cast of this movie is kind of unreal. Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Adam Driver, Timothy Olyphant, Rose Byrne, Connie Britton, Ben Schwartz… I dearly love the work that these actors have done, and I generally follow them into whatever movie or television worlds they choose to inhabit. Seeing This Is Where I Leave You was a no-brainer for me.

My reaction to it, however, is more complicated. I liked the parts, but not the sum of them. The whole of this layered family story felt incomplete, rushed, unsatisfying. It’s a bummer to write that down, too.

I wanted to love this movie. I wanted to believe that some of my favorite actors were Jew-ish (emphasis on the ish) siblings sitting shiva for their father’s death. But I just couldn’t do it. Corey Stoll, cast as eldest brother Paul Altman, was maybe the most believable in his role. He had tense authority, major jealousy issues, and pent-up regrets abound. He also really looked like the older sibling. Bateman, though, as middle brother Judd, didn’t sell me on his my-wife-left-me story. The parts of the movie where Bateman was serious and unhappy, I bought. But the second he turned on the Bateman smile and the Bateman timing, Judd disappeared and I had to reconcile this two-sided man with an unfortunate personal life and Jason Bateman’s superb comedic talent. Judd didn’t seem like a whole person. And neither did Tina Fey’s Wendy. Fey’s humor is so well-established at this point that even though her serious scenes were powerful, I couldn’t put together her meddling-sister remarks with her witty feistiness. Wendy was two people in one body. So was Adam Driver’s Phillip, the youngest, fuck-up-iest sibling. He rolled up to his father’s funeral in a Porsche, oozing confidence. But the second he was meant to crack jokes, he turned into Adam Driver, guy who plays Adam on Girls, bumbling and pausing and losing his cockiness. Of course, maybe the two-sidedness of these characters was meant to show how people have many facets, or that being around your siblings takes you to a different mental place, but the contrasts were too stark. It seemed as if the director just said, during lighthearted scenes, “Do your thing.” Everyone’s got gold in their comedy coffers, but this wasn’t the right movie to cash in.

The same argument can also be made for Ben Schwartz’s Rabbi Grodner, whom the Altman family took to poking fun at throughout the movie. He was basically only comic relief, and was superb at it, but he was Ben Schwartz in a yarmulke. It didn’t seem like a role so much as a cameo. No rabbi could be that cool, except Ben Schwartz himself. Connie Britton as Tracy, Phillip’s older, loaded, gorgeous girlfriend was supposed to be a stretch, story-wise, but it was too much of one. Timothy Olyphant as Wendy’s ex-boyfriend still living across the street from their childhood home: dreamy and too convenient.

Considering the amount of heightened family drama that happens over the seven days, and the amount of messiness that that would entail, this movie came out very tidy. Every plot point had a specific, almost predictable purpose, every loose end was tied up, every romantic action had an equal and opposite reaction. Judd’s “Have you ever been to Maine?” non-sequitur in the middle of the movie basically telegraphed his arc for the rest of it. Wendy’s longing looks at Olyphant’s Horry showed us exactly where her marriage was headed. The fact that Judd had dated Paul’s wife (the forever-sidekicked Kathryn Hahn) when they were younger led to a scene I’m sure you could write in your head right now. Though I like that none of the characters tried desperately to get anyone to like them, I wish I had had something to latch onto besides my loyalty to the actors.

The only character, and actor for that matter, who truly surprised me in this movie was Jane Fonda. Her story felt familiar — she was like Margaret Chenowith on Six Feet Under, trading the privacy of her childrens’ childhood for a lucrative book deal — but she was so much less threatening than Margaret, so much more oversexed and lax about everything, that she ended up earning my sympathy more than anyone else. And her scenes with each of her children contained the right amount of sincerity and humor, something that cannot necessarily be said for the rest of the film.

I didn’t leave this movie completely unsatisfied; I saw a bevy of my favorite actors trying something new and making one family’s sad week into a communal, amusing, relatable experience. But I expected so much more.