'Masterminds' is a delightfully silly mess that lovingly pokes fun at White Trash America.

Masterminds, which opened this past weekend, is a delightfully silly mess. The film’s studio, Relativity Media, originally slated it for last October, but then they underwent a debt crisis that forced them to shelve it and several other projects for a year. But it feels strangely apropos in our current, troubling political season. Masterminds, in the tradition of movies like Talladega Nights, aims squarely at people who used to be called “white trash.” If the movie had been written for a 2016 audience, there surely would have been some pointed references to Donald Trump’s appeal among the lesser-educated caucasian set. And while the film does laugh at the stupidity of its characters, it also imbues them with humanity: they love, they scheme, they manipulate, they wander, they dream, they crash and burn with often hilarious frequency. 

It’s the story of a Loomis Fargo employee who steals 17 million dollars from his employer, all ostensibly out of infatuation/love for his former co-worker. Zach Galifianakis, who resembles a pudgy hedgehog with his shoulder-length hair and a curtain of bangs, plays David Ghannt (who really did rob a Loomis Fargo, in 1997). He’s like a less disgusting version of the Cousin Eddie character from the Vacation movies. In an opening scene in which Ghannt and his co-worker Kelly (Kristen Wiig) are at a shooting range, David accidentally fires his gun after shoving it in the back of his pants, forcing Kelly to investigate any potential injuries to his backside. David doesn’t know to care what other people think of him, and as such, he’s not embarrassed that the girl he likes is checking his ass for bullet wounds. No, David goes about his life in a state of blithe obliviousness. He’s like a dim-witted Marx Brother, totally unaware of the gags he’s creating for our amusement. And yet, David’s smart enough to be dissatisfied with his crappy job and his bummer of a fiancé Jandyce (more on her later), which is probably why David agrees to Kelly’s robbery scheme. 

Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis and Kate McKinnon round out the principle cast: Wilson plays Steve, Kelly’s ex-boyfriend (or friend; the film doesn’t ever make it clear what their relationship is); Steve is the ultimate mastermind behind the robbery, although he does almost nothing to aid with the actual execution of the crime; Sudeikis plays a sleazy, mustachioed hitman that goes after David once he escapes to Brazil; and McKinnon plays Jandyce, who keeps her husband-to-be on a very tight leash, although not tight enough, as it turns out. McKinnon, who brandishes those crazy eyes of hers like she’s boring into the camera with two laser beams, seems to take particular delight in her character: a dominant sales clerk who shares a double-wide trailer with her taciturn mother and, of course, her man. (In one of the funniest scenes, David and Jandyce pose in a series of increasingly bizarre engagement photos outside their trailer.) 

As a movie, Masterminds may be slight to a fault. It suffers through enough plot holes, and it moves so fast that at times it fails to develop certain relationships adequately. But it’s kind of a relief, since so many comedies today wander for two hours until they come to predictable resolutions. Masterminds doesn’t seem concerned about resolving things, or taking an eternity to get its plot going. It’s not really concerned with plot at all, thank God. Twenty minutes in, David Ghannt has already committed the robbery (in a particularly funny sequence in which he piles copious stacks of freshly minted bills into the back of an armored vehicle, in which he inadvertently locks himself.) Masterminds cares more about shaping funny scenes around its tiny world of misfit morons than it does about the niggling beats of a plot that we already know from countless other movies. It assumes we don’t need a new take on the conventional robbery comedy, just more scenes with these delightful freaks. The only shame is that Galifianakis’s character is sent off to Brazil for most of the film, where he does not interact with the others in person (except for Jason Sudeikis). But in the mean time, the film tracks Kelly’s growing sense of guilt: she had no intention of joining him in Brazil, and Steve is about to rat him out so that neither of them will be implicated. Meanwhile, Steve and his money-grubbing wife (played by Mary Elizabeth Ellis) and their two put-upon children, embark on a spending spree. They acquire one of those standard stucco McMansions, which they fill with all the chintzy redneck trappings they can get their hands on, including a ghastly Elvis painting, and they stock the garage with a convertible and some big-wheeled sedan monstrosity. 

Perhaps most assuring is the fact that Masterminds never reforms any of its characters. If it made fun of white trash culture and then forced these people to become enlightened or sophisticated, the result would be insulting. (Steve and Michelle try to hob knob with some rich couples, but it’s clear that their money will never be enough to class them up.) Instead, we’re left with a truer more humane view of these characters. The director, Jared Hess, has a gift for creating strange comedy worlds (something he did very well in the sleeper hit Napoleon Dynamite); and even if Masterminds doesn’t always gel, it bumbles its way into some surprising truths about class in America: Are we really a nation in which you can change your status with money? Perhaps the answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no.  

Birdman

Michael Keaton has never really gotten his due as an actor. His insanely bizarre (and wonderful) performance in Beetlejuice was followed by a subdued, underwhelming turn in Batman (although it’s my favorite Batman movie to be sure) and then, despite some good performances, he just sort of disappeared into the morass of very good but slightly forgotten character actors. Birdman is sure to grab Keaton an Oscar nom, and Keaton’s performance is strong, but the movie is not the masterpiece people think it is. It’s a pretty good study of an actor’s neurosis, but more than anything it feels like a gimmicky show-piece, tailored for awards season, featuring a sort of greatest hits collection of actor moments. Everybody gets to shout and cry and have a nervous breakdown, which will make things easy come Oscar time when they have to pick a scene to showcase the nominee(s).

The film follows Riggan Thomson, a washed-up actor whose main achievement was playing a superhero in a film series called Birdman. Now Thomson is making his triple-threat Broadway debut, directing and starring in a play he adapted from the Raymond Carver short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Thomson is fraught with self-doubt and plagued by the voice of Birdman, who picks at him relentlessly at times, criticizing his every move and urging him to rekindle the Birdman flames by doing yet another sequel. This constant inner-critic may be quite real, especially for actors, and the movie suggests that every character in Birdman who is an actor is plagued by some sort of constant, nagging, demeaning voice inside. What’s more, Riggan Thomson himself is endowed with actual superpowers. He can move objects with his mind—Carrie-style—and he can even fly. Well, it’s never clear if these are really super-powers or if Thomson is simply hallucinating like Russell Crowe’s character in A Beautiful Mind, but  to the film’s credit, it allows this mystery to stay mysterious.  

The director of Birdman is Alejandro Iñárritu, whose previous credits include the Brad Pitt-everything-is-connected drama Babel (2006) and the awards darling Biutiful (2010). Iñárritu seems to enjoy putting people together who are ready to tear into each other and then stepping back and letting the sparks and wigs fly. (This is theater after all, and everyone is always on one side or the other of hair and make-up.) Iñárritu is fascinated by the inner-workings of the theater, and he obviously thinks we are too. But his fascination begins and ends with the pet neuroses of his characters, the actors. The non-actor characters in Birdman (except for Emma Stone’s character) are basically invisible. Actors acting is the main attraction, put on display like a sideshow attraction at a traveling circus. It’s like watching the autopsy of a play, or more likely, the autopsy of the art of performance. It feels all the more “behind-the-scenes-ish” because of the camera, which treats Birdman like a documentary.

Birdman feels fluid and alive because the director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity), is fond of shooting in long takes and letting the camera move around the set like a person. Most of the film takes place inside an old New York City theater, and the camera travels its narrow halls and invades it little claustrophobic rooms—as well as the main stage—like a nosy bystander recording every scene with a cell phone. Lubezki’s camera-work gives Birdman a certain visual style that has the ability to “wow” audiences because it’s very different from what they’re used to. And the movie bounches with energy as a result, even though that energy isn’t particularly organic. As interesting as the camera-work is, it feels like the movie’s chief gimmick, a hollow, obvious attempt to avoid feeling too stagey, too theatrical.

That’s the real issue I have with Birdman. Its many gimmicks don’t add up to anything substantive. There are lots of scenes of actors playing actors acting. And there are lots of scenes of actors playing actors having meltdowns or panic attacks. Iñárritu has identified all the well-known idiosyncrasies of artists who are terrified of failure and success, and who can never believe in their own talent. Naomi Watts, playing one of the stars of Thomson’s forthcoming play, has a moment when she realizes with utter disillusionment that she’s finally made it to Broadway and that the experience, one which she dreamed about most of her life, isn’t as satisfying as she’d imagined it. Or rather, it’s hugely crushing and ambiguous because it’s a giant success that’s riddled with frustrations and smaller disappointments. She longs to be validated by Riggan, who himself is seeking validation too. Watts is good, but there’s very little in her character beyond “self-obsessed neurotic actress,” which might easily have been written into the stage notes introducing her character if Birdman were an actual play.

There’s little dimension to most of these characters. Most of them are emotional wrecks, and the two characters who are supposedly the most dysfunctional are actually the most stable. One, played by Edward Norton, is a notoriously unpredictable theater actor named Mike Shiner, and the other, played by Emma Stone, is Riggan’s daughter, Sam, a recovering junkie. I could never quite buy her as a wreck because she seemed so much more together than the rest of the group. And Norton’s character, who shocks his co-stars by taking big risks on the stage, turns out to be the film’s voice of reason. He shouldn’t be, because he’s a jerk, but Iñárritu always allows him to make more sense than anyone else right after he’s done something to justifiably enrage them. He too is a kind of gimmick in this movie. The first time we see him, he strips down naked without a hint of shyness so the costume designer can fit him. He’s not afraid of being naked on the stage, you see. He’s a real actor who’s already done the work of feeling comfortable within himself and with his body. Fear of nakedness—physical or emotional—is for naïfs. Later, during a bed scene in the play, he tries to get Naomi Watts’s character to actually sleep with him, to make it more real. 

There is too much shouty, dramatic acting in Birdman and too much excessive neurosis. The movie is self-important, and maybe too aware of the fact that it has so much “going for it” in a sense. It does have a fine cast and parts that any actor would covet. Plus, it gets to play the literary game by referencing Raymond Carver, darling of the creative writing circuit, in almost every scene. But the Carver obsession feels self-indulgent. (Although that might just be my aversion to his writing.) The Raymond Carver we get in Birdman feels like straight Tennessee Williams: spare, ultra-male middle-class dysfunction, a less-bewitching, more economic version of A Streetcar Named Desire.

But, there are worse things than Birdman. It’s fascinating at times, and the drum score by Antonio Sanchez is pretty fantastic. It’s the most energizing thing about this movie. With Zach Galifianakis, who’s quite good as a prissy, anxious producer; Amy Ryan, as Thomson’s ex-wife and the calmest figure in the movie, Andrea Riseboroguh, Merritt Wever, and Lindsay Duncan.

The Campaign

Disappointingly undercooked political comedy. If you're hoping that The Campaign will provide some leavening comic relief from the election blitz, you may feel you've simply sunk even lower into the bowels of American politics by the time the credits roll. Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis, as rival contenders for a North Carolina Congressional district, prove how convincingly they can play horrible people. There are scattered laughs, but the movie tries to have it both ways: it's a showcase of the unmitigated greed and buffoonery of politicians who don't have the first notion of what it means to actually do their job, as well as a dirtified Frank Capra-ish tale of what it would be like if a truly honest politician were elected to perform some much-needed housecleaning. Neither tack works, because The Campaign fizzles pretty soon after it begins. The characters have no appeal, most of the actors aren't all that funny, and the scattered laughs only point up the amount of time there is between them. The audience I was with seemed to overcompensate with its laughter during the funny moments, as though we were laughing at what we hoped would be a funny movie that was only intermittently successful. And, if vulgarity turns you off, you would do well to avoid this movie. Crassness can be very funny, but only when it's clever. Here it's just chaotic and stupid.

Jay Roach once again demonstrates his infantile directorial sensibilities. He turns an ostensibly golden premise into a not-ready-for-publication waste of time, with little help from the writers, Chris Henshy and Shawn Harwell. You can tell that Ferrell and Galifianakis improvised a lot, but their mugging doesn't work as much as they probably hoped. (Ferrell never was all that funny unscripted.) Of course they have their moments. Both of them reek of comic potential, but they never do enough with their characters, which are essentially stereotypes: the good-old-boy politician who can't keep his pants on and talks in platitudes, and the creepy, prissy mama's boy who is inexplicably married with two sons. They never transcend these paper-thin roles, and you get the feeling it's because they haven't thought about what could be done with them. Will Ferrell always looks too self-contented with the mediocrity of his work.

There were a few actors in the supporting cast who give the movie a little pizzazz: Katherine LaNassa plays Ferrell's spouse, the ultimate trophy wife who knows how to play the supportive "other half" on screen as long as she gets what she wants. And Dylan McDermott, as Galifianakis' campaign manager, looks self-assured and cruelly dedicated to his job, which is being funded by two rich old brothers (played by Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow) who remind you of the old millionaires in Trading Places. In fact, The Campaign borrows more than a little from that movie's plot line.

With Jason Sudeikis as Ferrell's campaign manager, Brian Cox, Sarah Baker, Jack McBrayer, and a number of real-life media talking heads (Piers Morgan, Chris Matthews, Bill Maar, to name a few) appearing as themselves.

The Hangover

There's been much ado about The Hangover, my review of which is admittedly way late. It's about a Las Vegas bachelor party gone awry: the groom's three buddies awake the morning after to find their friend Doug (Justin Bartha) missing and their memories of the previous night as fuzzy as their knowledge of his whereabouts. They slowly piece together the events that led to their current dilemma, through a series of often chaotic comic vignettes.

The Hangover gives us easy laughs. Too easy, in fact, and yet this is being lauded as kind of a monumental comedic achievement by some. The characters are typically one-dimensional, utterly unlikeable ex-frat-boy types, who don't really even seem to like each other.

Bradley Cooper is especially pompous as Phil, the bronzed, athletic bachelor-type who happens to be a married science teacher. Unbelievable as his character is, he is alternately an irresponsible jerk and the determined leader of the group. Then there's Stu (Ed Helms), the dentist, perhaps the most successful--economically speaking--of the group. He's trapped in a dead-end relationship with a woman who's too much of a tyrannical nag to be sympathetic in her fear that her boyfriend will venture into a strip club during his Vegas exploits. (However, he's lied to her that they're going wine-tasting in Napa Valley instead.) Given the revelation (early in the movie) that she's cheated on him before, it's hard to buy the emasculating choke-hold she has over him, and much easier to accept his drunken Britney Spears-style marriage to a stripper (Heather Graham) with a heart of gold. Last is Alan (Zach Galifianakis), Doug's loopy, unpredictably weird brother-in-law-to-be, whose wacky personality allows for much of the plot--if one can call it plot--to advance.

There are too many plot-holes in The Hangover to forgive, even if the movie gives us a passably entertaining hour and thirty minutes. It's a pastiche of Swingers, Bachelor Party, and the lesser-known comedies Mystery Date and The Night Before. From these four movies we get the main themes of The Hangover: Las Vegas weekend out-of-control, bachelor party out-of-control, Chinese mafia villains complicating the storyline, and missing friend/memory failures. You may want to watch The Hangover to save time, but I think any of those four movies is equally watchable (although all of them are fairly flawed).

Also starring Jeffrey Tambor and Ken Jeong. Written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. Directed by Todd Phillips. ★★