On the basis of this movie, it will be her first exposure as a filmmaker to anyone like that.
Saving Silverman
(DIRECTED BY DENNIS DUGAN; STARRING JASON BIGGS, STEVE ZAHN; 2001)
Saving Silverman is so bad in so many different ways that perhaps you should see it as an example of the lowest slopes of the bell-shaped curve. This is the kind of movie that gives even its defenders fits of desperation.
Consider my friend James Berardinelli, the best of the Web-based critics. No doubt ten days of oxygen deprivation at the Sundance Film Festival helped inspire his three-star review, in which he reports optimistically, “Saving Silverman has its share of pratfalls and slapstick moments, but there’s almost no flatulence.” Here’s a critical rule of thumb: You know you’re in trouble when you’re reduced to praising a movie for its absence of fart jokes, and have to add almost.
The movie is a male-bonding comedy in which three friends since grade school, now allegedly in their early twenties but looking in two cases suspiciously weathered for anyone under a hard-living thirty-two, are threatened by a romance. Darren Silverman (Jason Biggs), Wayne Le Fessier (Steve Zahn), and J. D. McNugent (Jack Black) grew up together sharing a common passion for the works of Neil Diamond; their sidewalk band, the Diamonds, performs his songs and then passes the hat.
The band is broken up, alas, when Darren is captured by Judith Snodgrass-Fessbeggler (Amanda Peet), a blond man-eater who immediately bans his friends and starts transforming him into a broken and tamed possession. “He’s my puppet and I’m his puppet master!” she declares, proving that she is unfamiliar with the word mistress, which does not come as a surprise. In a movie so desperately in need of laughs, it’s a mystery why the filmmakers didn’t drag Ms. Snodgrass-Fessbeggler’s parents onstage long enough to explain their decision to go with the hyphenated last name.
Wayne and J. D. concoct a desperate scheme to save Darren from marriage. They kidnap Judith, convince Darren she is dead, and arrange for him to meet the original love of his life, Sandy Perkus (Amanda Detmer), who is now studying to be a nun. She hasn’t yet taken her vows, especially the one of chastity, and is a major babe in her form-fitting novice’s habit.
I was going to write that the funniest character in the movie is the boys’ former high school coach (R. Lee Ermey, a former marine drill sergeant). It would be more accurate to say the same character would be funny in another movie, but is stopped cold by this one, even though the screenplay tries. (When the boys ask Coach what to do with the kidnapped Judith, he replies, “Kill her.”)
The lads don’t idolize Neil Diamond merely in theory, but in the flesh, as well. Yes, Diamond himself appears in the film, kids himself, and sings a couple of songs. As a career decision, this ranks somewhere between being a good sport and professional suicide. Perhaps he should have reflected that the director, Dennis Dugan, has directed two Adam Sandler movies (both, it must be said, better than this).
Saving Silverman is Jason Biggs’s fourth appearance in a row in a dumb sex comedy (in descending order of quality, they are American Pie, Boys and Girls, and Loser). It is time for him to strike out in a new direction; the announcement that he will appear in American Pie II does not seem to promise that.
Steve Zahn and Jack Black are, in the right movies, splendid comedy actors; Zahn was wonderful in Happy, Texas, and Jack Black stole his scenes in High Fidelity and Jesus’ Son. Here they have approximately the charm of Wilson, the soccer ball. Amanda Peet and Amanda Detmer do no harm, although Peet is too nice to play a woman this mean. Lee Ermey is on a planet of his own. As for Neil Diamond, Saving Silverman is his first appearance in a fiction film since The Jazz Singer (1980), and one can only marvel that he waited twenty years to appear in a second film, and found one even worse than his first one.
Say It Isn’t So
(DIRECTED BY JAMES B. ROGERS; STARRING CHRIS KLEIN, HEATHER GRAHAM; 2001)
Comedy characters can’t be successfully embarrassed for more than a few seconds at a time. Even then, it’s best if they don’t know what they’ve done wrong—if the joke’s on them, and they don’t get it. The “hair gel” scenes in There’s Something About Mary are a classic example of embarrassment done right. Say It Isn’t So, on the other hand, keeps a character embarrassed in scene after scene, until he becomes an … embarrassment. The movie doesn’t understand that embarrassment comes in a sudden painful flush of realization; drag it out, and it’s not embarrassment anymore, but public humiliation, which is a different condition, and not funny.
The movie stars Heather Graham and Chris Klein as Jo and Gilly, a hairdresser and a dogcatcher who fall deeply in love and then discover they are brother and sister. Jo flees town to marry a millionaire jerk. Gilly lingers behind in public disgrace until he discovers they are not related after all. But since Jo’s family wants her to marry the rich guy, everybody conspires to keep Gilly away. The movie tries for a long-running gag based on the fact that everybody in town mocks Gilly because he slept with his alleged sister. They even write rude remarks in the dust on his truck. This is not funny but merely repetitive.
The movie was produced by the Farrelly brothers, who in There’s Something About Mary and Kingpin showed a finer understanding of the mechanics of comedy than they do here. Say It Isn’t So was directed by James B. Rogers from a screenplay by Peter Gaulke and Gerry Swallow, who show they are students of Farrellyism but not yet graduates. They include obligatory elements like physical handicaps, sexual miscalculations, intestinal difficulties, and weird things done to animals, but few of the gags really work. They know the words but not the music.
Consider a scene in which Chris Klein, as Gilly, punches a cow and his arm becomes lodged in just that portion of the cow’s anatomy where both Gilly and the cow would least hope to find it. I can understand intellectually that this could be funny. But to be funny, the character would have to have a great deal invested in not appearing like the kind of doofus who would pull such a stunt. Gilly has been established as such a simpleton he has nothing to lose. The cow scene is simply one more cross for him to bear. There is in the movie a legless pilot (Orlando Jones) who prides himself on his heroic aerial abilities. If he had gotten stuck in the cow and been pulled legless down the street—now that would have been funny. Tasteless, yes, and cruel. But not tiresome.
That leads us to another of the movie’s miscalculations. Its characters are not smart enough to be properly embarrassed. To be Jo or Gilly is already to be beyond embarrassment, since they wake up already clueless. The genius of There’s Something About Mary and Kingpin was that the characters played by Ben Stiller and Woody Harrelson were smart, clever, played the angles—and still got disgraced. To pick on Gilly and Jo is like shooting fish in a barrel.
Chris Klein’s character seems like someone who never gets the joke, who keeps smiling bravely as if everyone can’t be laughing at him. We feel sorry for him, which is fatal for a comedy. Better a sharp, edgy character who deserves his comeuppance. Heather Graham’s Jo, whose principal character trait is a push-up bra, isn’t really engaged by the plot at all, but is pushed hither and yon by the winds of fate.