Why do movies about writing a screenplay always have bad screenplays? Don’t you dare bring up Barton Fink in this conversation – that was the worst of the worst. Wait a sec. You’ll have to forgive me here; I started writing this review before I finished watching the film. I’d expected to pan it, but found Act III surprisingly uplifting, despite the 100% predicatbility. It’s all in the writing, I guess.
I want to like Hugh Grant. I really do. He’s played a pivotal role in some of my favorite films: About a Boy, Four Wedings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Love Actually. As he’s aged, however, I find his routines less cute and the bags under his eyes increasingly pronounced. It’s been a long while since I identified, or even wanted to identify, with a Hugh Grant character. The Rewrite didn’t alter this trend – Keith Michaels (Grant) is a has-been screenwriter. Trying to milk the same mojo as in About a Boy and Music and Lyrics, Grant plays a guy notable for nothing he’s done this century. His Oscar now many, many years in the past, Michaels can’t find his writing muse and probably couldn’t seal the deal even if he did.
“Luckily” for Michaels, there’s a staff opening at Binghamton University, and for lack of options, he takes a screenplay teaching job … and manages to score with vixen student Karen (Bella Heathcoate) within five minutes of arrival. Ah, the hidden perks … and career-suicidal traps … of teaching. If you’re scoring at home – hey, he did it, why shouldn’t you? – we’re following a has-been who can’t sell his work and takes a job he doesn’t want in a place he doesn’t want to be, makes no preparations for the anticipated job at hand and does something incredibly stupid upon arrival, then compounds it by insulting his department head (Allison Janney). And after all that, when required to trim the class size by culling among the submitted screenplays, he reads none of them and instead uses the student on-line guide to select a class full of lookers.
One could see this as a clever way of making sure there are only pretty people in your movie, but this is low. Lower than low. And making us root for a loser who turned an academic merit system into a beauty contest? Well, you can see why I started writing this review early.
However, if I judged every movie by first impressions, Swordfish might be in my top 10.
A key weapon in the writer’s arsenal is the mixed donut effect. This happens a lot in films set in college or, say, military
installations where there are 1) a lot of people who should be described, but 2) the movie is only two hours long. What you get, instead, in films like, say, Pitch Perfect, Renaissance Man, and The House Bunny is several characters each with one distinguishing feature or desire so you can tell them apart. Renaissance Man is a good comparison here because it, too, is about a reluctant teacher boxed into a corner.
While I wasn’t wild at all about the main character, there was much in the subcast of value, especially among the donuts. The mixed donut phenomena works much better in the writing genre as suddenly the donuts themselves grow in flavor with the “ideas” they generate – i.e. a kid into Star Wars becomes an aspiring writer penning a blatant Star Wars ripoff screenplay including a small, wizened green man named “Zoda.” And in case you were worried for our former Oscar winner, Marisa Tomei shows up as the larger, wizened, not-so-green woman to reflect Keith’s immaturity; I won’t spoil this relationship in case you’ve never seen a movie before.
At the end of the day, The Rewrite of the protagonaist is probably in order, but I loved the supporting cast. Mild recommendation.
In order to avoid truence
A lesson in astute prudence
When teaching your crew
Whatever you do
Be sure not to sleep with your students
Rated PG-13, 107 Minutes
D: Marc Lawrence
W: Marc Lawrence
Genre: Hugh Grant’s search for relevance
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Frustrated has-beens
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: School administrators
