The two characters at the center of Best Sellers make perfect sense together, not least because they rub each other entirely the wrong way for much of this story. She is a young publisher, on the brink of the financial collapse of a publishing house she inherited. He is a stubborn old author, whose barnstorming blockbuster of a novel, published 50 years previously, is the only good thing to which he’s ever put his name. She is looking for the hottest trending-topic-to-be. He probably has never heard of Twitter or Facebook or any other social media platform. To put it simply, he is analog, and she is paving the way for a generation that does not know what “analog” means.
Placing Harris Shaw, the author, and Lucy Stanbridge, the publisher, in this narrative together ensures a few things for screenwriter Anthony Grieco – just as offering the unique pairing of Michael Caine, as Harris, and Aubrey Plaza, as Lucy, offers endless potential for director Lina Roessler. Harris is a cantankerous and short-tempered, which isn’t usually what we attribute to Caine but on which the great actor is certainly capable of following through. Lucy, on the other hand, is deadpan, self-deprecating, and desperate, which is exactly what we attribute to Plaza. It’s a great pairing of seemingly disparate styles of acting and comic rhythm, and the actors get us through the hurdle of their early interactions and plot setup.
Lucy needs a hit for her publishing house, which has just released a novel set to underperform by tens of thousands of copies. It’s also receiving awful reviews – not only from major publications but also from prominent voices on YouTube. Lucy’s solution is to go back into the contracts drawn up by her father when he ran the business, find some loophole that will force a random author to write a new book and publicize the living daylights out of the new work. She finds something of a miracle in Harris, whose novel Atomic Autumn sparked as much praise as it did controversy half a century ago. He agrees to publish a new book on one condition: that she must not make any edits. That’s fine, says Lucy, as long as Harris does a book tour.
Once they set off, the precision of these early stages of storytelling begins to slip for Grieco and Roessler. Instead of trusting in the comic potential of their premise, the film introduces a lot of strangely broad humor, based entirely around Harris’ stodgy attitude. He reads from Penthouse on his first stop, comes close to physically assaulting an uptight literary critic (Cary Elwes in an inexplicable cameo) and eventually goes viral, not for the new material he has published, but for opening the book and substituting every word with the rude stand-in for cow manure.
It’s amusing enough, mainly because Caine is a good sport, but then the film decides to turn sincere with a pair of revelations about the shared past between these two. It involves, of course, Lucy’s father, with whom Harris had come to an understanding about his first novel, and Harris’ health, and the two developments predictably recalibrate the dynamic of this relationship. The nature of this turn also introduces a lot of false drama into what once was a wry and likable comedy. Best Sellers has a wellspring of promise in both its premise and the actors chosen to headline the story, but it cannot keep well enough alone.
Photo courtesy of Screen Media
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