Screwball comedy was already out of fashion when Peter Bogdanovich revived the genre with What’s Up, Doc, the fast-talking follow-up to his 1971 breakthrough The Last Picture Show, and he did little to reinvent the style’s conventions. The story is a routine affair, straight out of classic Hollywood, and the characters are similarly contrived, stock figures quite unlike the conflicted miscreants popular during the New Hollywood period. It’s what Bogdanovich does with the material that makes the film substantial. Like Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges, Bogdanovich orchestrates marvelous moments out of the skimpiest circumstances, proving that part of being a great director – in the classic sense – is being a great stager.
Whether or not he’s still a great director, Bogdanovich’s staging of screen comedy remains sharp, if a little forced. His latest film is She’s Funny That Way, another nostalgic, self-reflexive riff on the screwball model. Nothing in the film is as inspired as What’s Up, Doc’s San Francisco car chase—to this day one of the great feats of physical comedy in cinema, a self-contained metaphysical break reminiscent of a high-octane Buster Keaton two-reeler—but it remains a satisfying account of a Brooklyn prostitute who joins the cast of a Broadway play. A romantic farce, the film’s uneven script and familiar premise is elevated by a gifted ensemble of comedians and one or two charming set pieces that enliven the film’s duller stretches. It generates good energy, even if it falls short of achieving that perfect sense of screwball chaos.
The film was originally called Squirrels To The Nuts, a reference to a line from fellow screwball devotee Ernst Lubitsch’s last completed film, Cluny Brown: “Some people like to feed nuts to the squirrels, but if someone wants to feed squirrels to the nuts, who am I to say nuts to the squirrels?” It’s a line lascivious theater director Arnold Albertson (Owen Wilson uses to entice doe-eyed young actresses into sex, and it works like gangbusters on escort and aspiring actress Isabella Patterson, played with surprising brio by Imogen Poots.
Arnold is all too pleased with his latest conquest until she walks into the audition room of his upcoming stage drama. From there spins a web of sticky romantic quagmires. Isabella is quickly wooed by the play’s writer, Joshua (Will Forte), much to the dismay of Albert, who’s simultaneously keeping things from his wife and lead actress Delta (Kathryn Hahn), herself indulging in some lingering attraction to her co-star and former beau, Seth (Rhys Ifans). Things get even more complicated from there. We also have Joshua’s neurotic psychologist girlfriend (Jennifer Aniston) and her equally neurotic patient (Austin Pendleton), an obsessive former client of Isabella’s who hires a private detective that is also Joshua’s father to track her every move. Confused yet?
This loopy, disorienting structure is a Bogdanovich staple, and the director, working from a script he cowrote with Louise Stratten, strings it all together in the same claptrap, just-go-with-it fashion as screwball mainstays. Like The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and The Shop Around the Corner before it, She’s Funny relies on character interplay and bubbly dialogue to sustain audience engagement. The comedy comes in droves but the film isn’t consistently funny or original. It’s telling, for instance, that the best line is lifted from another movie. On top of that, some performers are less equipped for this style than others; most scenes contain five or six actors and it’s painfully obvious that not everyone is at the same level of ability.
These rhythmic deficiencies might be explained by Bogdanovich’s time away from the movies. She’s Funny That Way is his first theatrical feature since 2001, and he seems to not only have lost his way with actors but also with his visual acuity. The film’s unimaginative framing and indifferent lighting aren’t exactly reminiscent of the elegant camerawork seen in Paper Moon, What’s Up, Doc and Nickelodeon. Bogdanovich doesn’t have Lazlo Kovacs at his disposal, but the filmmaking here is merely efficient, damning praise for such a passionate director, one whose entire career was founded on his uniquely obsessive love of cinema. When the film reaches its lifeless finale and the in-jokes and film reference culminate in a random cameo from another famous movie-buff-turned-director, it’s enough to wonder whether Bogdanovich even cares anymore.