THE INHUMAN CENTIPEDE

RIP to the great James Gandolfini, who embodied Tony Soprano among many other vivid characters, passed on too young at 51.

With Disney/Pixar’s Monsters University opening this weekend…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to the severe centipede-like Dean Hardscrabble in that film, voiced by the great Helen Mirren…

PRO AND CONJURE

The opening minutes of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone are a pretty convincing depiction of how, very probably, most show-biz careers are spawned.

The title character, though he hasn’t yet given himself that grand moniker, is chased down the street by a gang of bullies on his 10th birthday, in 1982. Their gift to him is a punch in the stomach and a blunt reminder that he’s a loser who no one will ever like.

His gift from his mother, however, is better: a Rance Holloway magic set with an instructional videocassette in which the great prestidigitator assures him that everybody loves a magician. Burt and his only friend Anton build on what they learn from this basic stuff, and soon they’re partners in a stage act.

Burt and Anton are played, in this prologue, by the excellent Mason Cook and Luke Vanek, respectively. Steve Carrell and Steve Buscemi take over when they hit adulthood, and their Vegas act, full of elaborate sets and huge hokey props, is a fixture at Bally’s, with its own theatre. Ten years into their run there, Burt has been turned by boredom and repetition into a hateful jackass, snarling contemptuously at everyone who works with him, including the long-suffering Anton. He lives in joyless luxury in a casino penthouse, where even his nightly seductions of comely volunteers from the audience have become a carefully-rehearsed routine.

But like any other star, Burt finds himself in decline, threatened by the newfangled stylings of the insufferable Steve Gray, “Brain Rapist” (Jim Carrey), who wows the crowds with extreme “street magic” stunts, often involving revolting abuse of his own body. Burt and Anton’s act—and friendship—fall apart when they try to compete with this approach, and Burt finds himself unemployed, broke and at the reluctant mercy of his disgusted assistant Jane (Olivia Wilde), herself an aspiring magician.

The rest of the movie, rather snappily directed by TV veteran Don Scardino from a script by several hands, including John Francis Daley of Freaks and Geeks, is about Burt’s attempts to resurrect himself, both as a performer and a person. It’s a perfectly legitimate template for a showbiz story, and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone entertained me, and made me laugh quite a bit.

But it’s marred, for me seriously, by a high degree of cloddish, heavy-handed shtick of what I suppose might be called the Hangover school: mean-spirited slapstick and obvious, telegraphed jokes. There are lengthy set-pieces, like Burt and Anton’s stunt in a suspended booth, or Anton’s imbecilic charitable efforts, that seem meant to convulse us with hilarity. But they just go thud, like a failed a magic trick.

It isn’t just that these scenes aren’t funny. It’s that they’re not consistent with the characterizations. Anton, for instance, is supposed to be the smart, sensitive half of the pair, so the gag about his misguided interactions with Third World people plays particularly dumb.

This side of the material also feels disingenuous in the face of what the movie seems to be championing—corny but comparatively genteel showmanship over shock. It struck me, by the way, that Burt and Anton’s show could still play in Vegas to full houses, and leave them well and unironically satisfied. (I’d certainly go.)

What saves the movie is the sensational cast. Despite the unhilarious nature of the stuff he’s given to do, Carrey isn’t bad at all in his Criss Angel send-up. James Gandolfini is very funny as the dull-souled Bally’s honcho, and Buscemi is always easy to like.

As for Carrell, he’s about as poised a leading man as you’ll find in American movies right now. He has suavity and charm balanced with an accessible everyman quality and a comedic fearlessness. His best moment here is the pleasure Burt registers, quietly but deeply, when he meets his old idol Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin in full curmudgeon mode) in a retirement home—it’s the point at which Burt starts the trudge back from Assholedom, and it gives a hint of the movie that The Incredible Burt Wonderstone could have been.

But then, the potentially touching scene in which Burt and Anton make up is thrown away on overplayed and way overextended mock-sniveling. Carrell and Buscemi both deserve better than this, but alas, they’re complicit in it. It’s a lousy trick they’ve played on themselves.

THAT THING THEY DIDN'T

Even without the presence of James Gandolfini in the cast, Not Fade Away would be recognizable as the work of Sopranos creator David Chase. It’s made in Chase’s signature style—the same short, elliptical vignettes, starting and ending suddenly, often leaping forward in time, leaving much for the audience to infer about their significance, and about what’s happened in between.

It can be a potent storytelling method, liberating both filmmaker and audience from tiresome, de rigueur narrative tropes. It has its limitations, too, and Chase runs into them here, not for the first time. But for the first half or so of its length, it frees Not Fade Away from coming-of-age movie sentiment and preciousness.

Not Fade Away is about a rock band in New Jersey in the ‘60s. John Magaro is our hero, the usurping lead singer, Gandolfini and Molly Price are superb as his disappointed working-class parents, and Bella Heathcote is his willowy muse from the other side of the tracks. A bunch of fine, funny, authentic-seeming guys play the other band members. The movie isn’t a show-biz story, however. The focus is much more on family life and girlfriends, college and summer jobs, dinner table squabbles about long hair and Vietnam.

The band plays a few gigs over a few years, shows some promise, teeters on the edge not of stardom but of simple professionalism, as opposed to adolescent goofing off. But they’re doomed by internal egos and envies and agendas. They don’t become one-hit wonders, like the guys in That Thing You Do! They don’t even have their one glorious performance, like the title ensemble of The Commitments. They’re no-hit wonders.

Chase wants find the value and importance even in this abortive venture, and he does find some. He has a firm grasp of what, ultimately, being a rock musician is for: Getting laid. But that’s not the same as what rock music, itself, is for—the soul-deepening comforts and exhilarations it can provide to its listeners and practitioners. Chase gets past the vulgarity of the desire to hit the rock-star lottery, even if his characters don’t, and gives a hint of the growth that music has given them, without their awareness.

But in the second half, as both the band and the hero’s romance begin to fracture into disillusionment, the movie just keeps on going and going. After a while, especially after the hero and heroine leave Jersey for California, it’s like a guy in a bar boring you with an over-detailed account of his long-lost youth. There’s a lovely final coda involving the hero’s little sister (the charming Meg Guzulescu) asserting the cosmic importance of rock-n-roll, but if it’s somehow intended to pull the whole movie together, it doesn’t come close.

I doubt it is so intended, however. As the non-ending of his Sopranos series finale showed, Chase has an aversion to offering dramatic resolution. Brilliant though he is, I find this a failing, and I found that last episode a failure. The desire to confound audience expectation is perhaps commendable; deliberately leaving your audience unsatisfied is less so. Not Fade Away has the same attitude, and unlike the Soparanos finale, it doesn’t even have the virtue of abruptness. Despite the title, fade away—slowly and morosely—is just what this movie does.