Role-Playing
Games
THE
IMPOSTERS
Writer/director Stanley Tucci reminds us there's s fine line between acting and
lying.
With Stanley Tucci, Oliver Platt, Campbell Scott
Written and directed by Stanley Tucci
AS THE CURTAIN OPENS on The Imposters, Arthur and Maurice are sitting at separate tables in a quaint 1930s café, sipping delicately from little porcelain coffee mugs. One asks the other for some sugar, and the other courteously obliges. The other entreats a light from the maitre d'. A beautiful woman walks by, and each man tries to woo her. Their competition escalates into a duel with knives.
Then, Maurice has the temerity to get stabbed first when it was supposed to be Authur's turn to die.
For these two friends are only - ACTING! They're unemployed master thespians who'll do anything for an audience, and if they don't get work soon, they'll have to start pulling scams in bakeries just to get some food. (Uh, never mind: They already do that.) They audition for a nervous playwright (Woody Allen in a clever cameo) who's about to lose his financing. Then one things leads to another, and they find themselves becoming accidental stowaways on a ship of fools that's bound for Paris and loaded with a bevy of imposters far more loony and desperate than they.
After Big Night, actor Stanley Tucci's sentimental and lugubrious debut films as a writer/director, a movie like this is the last thing you'd expect from him. But The Imposters is almost magically good - funny and skillful, at once purely entertaining and gently post-modern, with the kind of farcical situations you see ruined over and over by stupid movie directors, but which Tucci manages to get just right.
What's even more wondrous is that he directs himself in the movie, as if keeping track of the absurdity isn't more than enough for one writer/director to do. The Imposters could have been thoroughly idiotic and filled with insignificant noise. Instead, it's an extended exercise in good, smart, boisterous, semi-clean fun.
Arthur (portrayed by Tucci) and Maurice (Oliver Platt, who generously gets top billing) end up on the cruise ship after fleeing the clutches of Burtrum (Alfred Molina), a hambone Shakespearean actor whom they insult in a bar after watching his drunken portrayal of Hamlet. But wouldn't you just know it: Burtrum is taking the same trans-Atlantic cruise the next morning, and when he recognizes the pair, who are posing as stewards, he orders the ship's captain to eliminate them. Thus begins one of many chases, which Tucci sets to brassy jazz music like you'd expect from a cinematic vaudeville/burlesque.
In their efforts to stay alive aboard the ship, Arthur and Maurice discover an assortment of lechery, deceit and intrigue afoot.
An oily Teutonic officer with a scar on his cheek (Campbell Scott, imitating Dr. Strangelove) lusts after a sweet employee (Lili Taylor) who helps the hapless stowaways. A star athlete (Billy Connolly) with a crushing handshake loves to talk about the beauty of the male form and falls for Maurice in drag (some like it hot, I guess). A singer named Happy (Steve Buscemi) wants to kill himself - his spontaneous suicide attempt is a scream - until he meets a morose young woman (Hope Davis) who enjoys poems about death. And a foreign lady (Isabella Rossellini) secretly dresses herself in a diamond-studded tiara, apparently because she's - well, the Grand Duchess Anastasia?
Meanwhile, two crude New York hustlers pose as French citizens in a scam to cheat rich people out of their money. And the ship's chief steward (Tony Shalhoub) is an agent of foreign revolutionaries who want to blow up the ship's bourgeois inhabitants and make the point that mankind should live with out masks or facades (on this ship, good luck!).
Silly, silly, silly - and then silly some more. But don't let that keep you away. Somehow - and there's really know way of knowing just how - Tucci directs his cast to absolutely perfect over-performances. It's easy to be a bad actor, but it's next to impossible to pretend to be one. That's what Tucci and Platt do in The Imposters. The rest of the cast, with help from director Tucci, all seem to know just how far to overplay their caricatures to make their pratfalls and double takes funny but not ridiculous. Their work is as once a treatise on acting style and a gallery of good examples of it.
Are there themes among all this nonsense? Oh, sure. How about this: Life is a tissue of lies, and only when we cut through the lies do we discover our humanity. Or this: Bad actors love to play big death scenes, but only those actors with some life experience - which Arthur and Maurice get on their adventure - are good enough to do it well. The Imposters ends with its cast members dancing off the elaborate cruise-ship set and into a dark Hollywood night. It's a goofy Mel Brooks moment among many in a movie with ample doses of sophisticated Woody Allen, too.
A MERRY
WAR
With Richard E. Grant, Helena Bonham Carter
Based on a novel by George Orwell
Directed by Robert Bierman
HAPLESS, GUILELESS AND APPROPRIATELY DOUR, George Comstock is a poet of "exceptional promise." At least that's what the Times Literary Supplement says about his palm-sized first chapbook of poems, and it's more than enough to convince him that it's true.
So George (Richard E. Grant) quits his job writing brilliant ad copy on the very day he gets a promotion and a raise, leaving behind his girlfriend Rosemary (a sprightly Helena Bonham Carter), who is a talented artist as their advertising firm. They keep dating, so to speak - it's difficult finding a place to consummate their love - but everything else in George's life changes: He gets a meager job in a bookstore to support himself, and he rents a gloomy pied-a-terre in a home owned by an English lady whose window displays an aspidistra, the leafy green house plant that signifies middle-class respectability - which is the very thing George wants to overthrow with his moody anti-capitalist poetry.
Based on George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and set all over sunny 1934 London, A Merry War is a bright and lively situation comedy and social satire with a romantic undercurrent, and with lots of invitingly unresolved ideas about reconciling the gap between life and art - which is to say, responsibility and freedom.
It has an easy-to-follow college-English-class braininess to it, with lots of literary name dropping, from George's obsession with becoming a modern-day Shakespeare or Blake, to a party that he misses where he might have met Eliot, Huxley, and "Dylan, who ended up under a table." It even opens with a tip of the hat to its creator: A truck labeled "Blair Bros. Engraving" stops just long enough for the well-trained English major to recall that Orwell's real name was Eric Blair.
But most of all, it's very, very funny. Adapting and enhancing Orwell, screenwriter Alan Plater and director Robert Bierman (a former director of British TV commercials) have put together a smooth and genial satirical comedy that takes a charming-cum-facetious romp through England's mid-century class awareness.
George has a generous, supportive, well-connected "Socialist" publisher friend who doesn't like the way working-class people smell, and whose snooty lover likes to spend her Thursday afternoons in bed having orgasms and drinking champagne. His sister is a waitress who mothers him and loans him money. His aspidistra landlady is a prude who doesn't permit visitors, so George injects her beloved plants with ink in order to kill them slowly. His second flat - in a dangerous and seedy part of town, where "even the tomcats walk in twos" - is always cold because the heat draws the bugs out of the wallpaper.
When George has no money, he writes poems about how evil money is. When he gets $50 from a small American literary magazine, he declares himself "a poet of international reputation" and takes Rosemary and his publisher friend to an elite restaurant. "It's jolly good," he says, drunk on expensive spirits, and drawing the attention of the wealthy regulars. "I can see why you keep it to yourselves."
He finally learns (or does he?) that the working poor are the best people on earth because they say what's on their mind. And in the end - which is oddly tender, or else subtly ambiguous - he manages to combine his love of literature and his contempt for advertising, all thanks to the guy who shovels the manure left on the streets by carriage horses. It's a rather blatant climactic joke in a movie that's loaded with them, but also with some wry and appealing insights on art, money, class, love and being English.