My reaction to the first few minutes of this Peter Farrelly-directed alleged comedy was a degree of relief that it was not in the same gross-out vein as Farrelly Brothers hits Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary – but that emotion quickly gave way to frustration that the humor was evidently so restrained as to be virtually non-existent. Given that their one truly brilliant comedy – Kingpin – was from a script not written by them, one wonders what either is doing trying to make movies based on his own depressingly unfunny ideas. This movie proves the folly of that ambition. The scenario is mismatched traveling companions – Viggo Mortensen as a rough-edged, blue-collar Italian-American chauffeur, and Mahershala Ali as a cultivated, if uptight, African-American pianist – on a tour of the Deep South in the 1960s. For all I know, it may have some basis in fact, as the promotional blurb seems to suggest – the problem is, it doesn’t seem plausible, despite the considerable effort lavished on setting up Mortensen’s background, replete with characters straight out of Goodfellas and its small-screen wannabe version The Sopranos.
Whilst this clash of personalities and cultures is not, to my mind, intrinsically funny, one wouldn’t have cared if the script had the comic sparkle of a Planes, Trains and Automobiles or The Odd Couple – but it does not, and watching it is a chore. Ultimately, the performances are too one-note to be convincing, let alone interesting, and I rapidly tired of both of these tedious, predictable ciphers. The film does look great – lots of sharp suits and cars with tailfins – but this can scarcely rescue it from the more profound problem of its confusion about whether it is trying to be comedy or social commentary, and it’s simply not well written enough to succeed on either count.
FATAL VISIONS 