The Comedian Plot Summary:
Former sitcom star Jackie Burke (Robert De Niro) can’t seem to escape the shadow of his TV persona. After he punches a heckler at a show, he gets sentenced to community service where he meets Harmony (Leslie Mann) who helps change his life.
The whole “washed up (comedian/actor/detective/what have you) meets someone, learns important lessons and revitalizes their career” routine is pretty standard. It’s easy to fill in the appropriate blanks to the formula and create a rough story structure out of it. It won’t be a particularly inspired story if you’re just going through the motions, but at least it will be decent. That’s why it’s pretty shocking when something manages to screw it up as badly as The Comedian did.
You can see the faint outlines where there was supposed to be a story in this movie. Jackie is meant to be your usual former star, struggling to break out on his own and failing in all his personal relationships because he’s mean and unreliable. The problem is the movie constantly refuses to actually demonstrate this, or have any consequences for his actions.
From the very first scene where he does stand-up, the audience laughs and cheers along with him. Everywhere he goes, the crowds go wild for him; there’s virtually no difference between the reception he gets at his beginning low point and the end when he’s riding high. All of his friends and family love and support him no matter how badly he treats them, and he never has to, or even tries to make up for his terrible behavior. Even when people actually hate him, like sister-in-law Flo (Patti LuPone), or the heckler he punches, they’re treated as cartoonishly awful and unreasonable. We’re clearly never meant to believe that anyone has a legitimate grievance or thinks he’s unfunny, so what does he have to come back from?
If Jackie’s character has no arc, at least he’s consistent. That’s more than can be said for most of the cast, especially co-lead Harmony. We’re introduced to Harmony as she argues with her father Mac (Harvey Keitel) about how she wants to stay in New York and live her own life, which sets up a pretty clear conflict. Except this is never followed through. She argues with her dad a little more the next time she sees him, and then does everything he says without question and disappears from the movie. When she finally reappears, it’s to drop a bizarre final act twist that does nothing to actually move forward with any of the movie’s plots, instead creating a new one entirely for things to end on.
An underwritten female character is nothing new for a Hollywood movie, but Harmony is especially egregious: she has zero agency, her arc gets no resolution and every single thing about her is ultimately there just to serve Jackie’s nonexistent character arc. Even that is better than the supporting cast. From Jackie’s brother (Danny DeVito) to his manager Miller (Edie Falco), their only purpose is to be abused by Jackie, and yet continue to bend over backwards to help him at every turn.
Writing problems this severe can’t be papered over, but they could at least be mitigated by great performances. Sadly, such salvation is nowhere to be found here. Robert De Niro is a great actor, but the man would obviously rather be anywhere else than starring in this movie. He coasts through dialogue fine, but any time he’s called to do stand-up (which is frequently), the lack of effort really hurts. His idea of delivering jokes largely consists of screaming a lot and sometimes whispering to himself, which might function as a decent parody of bad comedians, but is pretty unfortunate when we’re supposed to think he’s great.
Leslie Mann, meanwhile, utterly fails to bring together the massive inconsistencies known as Harmony’s character into a cohesive whole. She can hardly be blamed for not accomplishing such a herculean task, but the intermittent bursts of mania she performs to try to make sense of it hurt more than they help.
Most egregiously of all for a movie called The Comedian, it is dreadfully unfunny. There are countless extended sequences of Jackie (and occasionally other comedians) performing stand-up, and not a single one of them produces even the barest hint of a laugh. The writer is apparently totally enamored of shock comics, to the point that every single “joke” consists of nothing but people screaming profanities, yelling about sex, or shouting racist and homophobic stereotypes.
The big show stopping performance that puts Jackie back on top is literally nothing but him lumbering around screaming “POOPY!” at old people, and this is treated as the height of comedy. If the movie was trying to make some awful, misguided point about “PC Culture” or whatever, that would be bad, but at least then you could understand why it was making these choices. Instead it just genuinely seems to believe that this is really funny. Exactly why it thinks that is a mystery we may never be able to solve.
If it’s not clear by now, The Comedian is bad. It’s very, very bad. It ruins its own story by idolizing its protagonist, a man who is not only unpleasant but deeply unfunny. Plenty of movies have had a myopic focus on their protagonist, but few so clearly demonstrate why that is so toxic to the storytelling process. If the writer had stepped back and realized how their script was treating its main character, perhaps this movie could have been salvaged. Then again, the jokes would still have all been terrible, so maybe not. Either way, you’d be better off going to an open mic night than seeing this movie. At least when you boo someone there, they might actually stop.
Rating: 3 out of 10
https://youtu.be/gLQXUmzXuEo
