You don’t have to be a Trekkie to love William Shatner, but it helps. It helps a lot. Without the Star Trek stuff, the career of William Shatner -or “Bill” as the film keeps imploring me to call him- is negligible at best. It’s like asking to enjoy Patrick Mahomes entirely for his work on State Farm ads. Watching Bill, the actor, discuss his trade makes me believe the man is either an acting genius or a complete idiot.
I could go either way.
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As a dramatic actor, William Shatner was always something of a punchline. As I grew up, he was a Tier 2 impression. Everybody on the playground could do a Fred Rogers or Roscoe from “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Aspiring comedians like myself, however, went next level, picking on Howard Cosell, Muhammad Ali, or, yes, William Shatner. Shatner was always so overdramatic that his abbreviated delivery was a punchline unto itself … yet he compensated considerably by understanding comic delivery; the arts will always love a performer who can poke fun at himself, and that might be William’s Shatner’s most endearing quality.
You Can Call Me Bill is William Shatner sitting in a chair, talking to a camera for 90 minutes. And yet, writer/director Alexandre O. Philippe divided up the elongated Ted talk/soliloquy in to separate chapters about horses, masks, acting, loneliness, and finally/sadly the Earth itself. As Bill speaks, I honestly wondered if he knew anything about his craft. And I was amazed by his constant use of metaphors. That man never met anything he didn’t wish to describe as something else. Of course, that would be a simile … but you get the idea.
Bill likes to talk about stuff. I was surprised that he had heroes, but Marlon Brando and Sir Laurence Olivier spoke to him. I love the part where Shatner pointed out Olivier just riffing cuz he lost his Oscar acceptance speech. Will Bill has remained consistent, the world has changed around him. The advent of Trump has both hindered and bolstered Shatner:
There was a time in which William Shatner’s undeniable narcissism would have been viewed with alarm. However
, in a universe where Donald Trump grabs two out of every three headlines, Shatner’s relatively quaint egotism looks delightfully puerile by comparison.
OTOH, a Bill interview is a stream-of-consciousness event. Were there no President Trump, we might find this naïvely entertaining … but now, pointless drifting from topic to topic has grown increasingly tiresome. Would you ever want to meet Trump? I wouldn’t because the man never shuts the fuck up. William Shatner is not Donald Trump. William Shatner is a force of good and somebody who cares even if what he cares about is completely wrapped in his own world view. But when Shatner rambles, he can remind one of Trump and nobody needs that. Not even MAGA.
This is -essentially-the same film as Still: A Michael J. Fox movie. It’s an elongated interview with a popular and amiable Canadian actor punctuated by clips from his body of work. Theoretically, this could be the same film. And yet I found Still the far more charming of the two. Is it because of the Parkinson’s or Fox’s age or because of the characters he has played, the fact that I think he’s a better actor, or maybe just that he had the presence of mind to talk about somebody other than himself once or twice? Maybe it was all of the above. Maybe it was just that I saw this same film a few months ago. Whatever; I didn’t really need to see it again.
♪A man sits in a chair
It’s a chair on a strange set
Maybe it’s the Captain’s chair
Maybe it’s his first interview
Doesn’t speak no Klingon
He’s so old currently
He is a speechful man
He is forever in surround sound
Trekkies at the convention
Autographs and photo ops
He looks around, around
He sees reflection in the camera
Spinning him infinitely
He says, He says, “Amen and Hallelujah!”
If you’ll be my engineer
I can make lose your will
I will call you Scotty
And Scotty, when you call me, you can call me Bill♫
Rated PG-13, 96 Minutes
Director: Alexandre O. Philippe
Writer: Alexandre O. Philippe
Genre: Have you seen me?
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: First generation Trekkies
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Can this guy talk about something other than himself? … Oh no, preaching. Please go back to talking about yourself.
♪ Parody Inspired by “You Can Call Me Al”
