Charlie Day, the writer and director of Fool’s Paradise, is not shy about his influences. Best known for his work on the long-running sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Day’s feature-length debut is a showbiz satire that owes a great deal to The Player and Bowfinger. Since Day’s character is a wide-eyed innocent who does not speak, he recalls the great physical comedians from the silent era. But the biggest influence, the film to which Day owes a great debt, is Hal Ashby’s dark comedy Being There. Stealing from the best is a time-honored tradition in the movies, but there is a long between homage and replica, and Day often finds himself on the wrong side of it. There is a kind of folly in this film, a consistent misfire with good intentions that always, without fail, goes more for the most obvious laugh. It is deadly when a comedy does not inspire a smile, let alone a chuckle, and the broad, frankly annoying supporting characters do little to help.
When we meet Day’s character, he is in a mental institution. He has no family, and is so simple-minded that he is incapable of speech and easily suggestible. When this man is released into the public, it does not take long for a Hollywood producer (Ray Liotta) to realize he’s a dead ringer for the star of his movie, a Western about Billy the Kid. In a dual performance, Day also portrays the British actor playing Billy the Kid – a kind of primadonna who takes a misunderstanding about method acting to an extreme – and so the simpleton Day character (now named “Latte Pronto”) allows the production to continue. Latte becomes a big star, which exposes him to the movie business at its self-centered, aggressive extreme. Fool’s Paradise develops an episodic nature, with Latte wandering through one improbable situation after another, and Day is clearly asking his actor friends for favors.
The film’s primary joke is that hardly anyone notices, or cares, that Latte does not speak. His co-star (Adrien Brody) thinks it’s a sign of authenticity, while his eventual wife (Kate Beckinsale) sees his silence as an improvement. In each scene, Day envisions a Hollywood wallowing in familiar cliches about Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy, the kind that might have felt fresh a few generations ago. By the time John Malkovich appears as a kind of machiavellian string-puller, the film loses its coherence and instead effectively becomes an excuse for actors to mug to the camera. Longtime fans of It’s Always Sunny may enjoy many of the show’s actors appearing here, like Jimmi Simpson as a talk show host or David Hornsby as a frightened pilot. Still, their inclusion has the unintentional effect of reminding us that, when he’s on familiar territory, Day’s sensibilities can be a lot sharper. Some of his decisions are outright disasters, like when Glenn Howerton – who was so good in Blackberry – appears here in brown face (most of the filming happened in 2018, a period before Sunny scrubbed its episodes where the cast used cringey racial stereotypes).
Other than Day’s wide-eyed physical performance, which lacks the physical grace you might expect from Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton, the actor who appears the most in the film is Ken Jeong. He plays Lenny, an obsequious publicist who barely hides his pathetic nature and talks a mile a minute. Jeong is best in small doses – think about his scene-stealing role in The Hangover – and here he has a significant amount of dialogue, a walking plot device who puts Latte in dubious situations, whether it’s a Hollywood premiere or a seedy porn shoot. It is a bad performance – shrill, annoying, unsympathetic – and his constant presence in the film is a distraction. Being There actually had something to say about politics and the upper echelons of American society, and crucially, there was a plausibility in how Chance the Gardener nearly becomes President. Fool’s Paradise comes from a place of bemusement, not anger, and that helps explain why so many stars appear in the film. A good satire will go for the jugular, and since these actors are only kidding around, it is about as inoffensive as a production assistant taking the wrong coffee order.
Photo courtesy of Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions
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