As schools reopen, leaves change color and Oscar-bait season begins to bloom, every new movie is an object lesson in the logic of prestige. Who gets to make what films, with whom, and with which awards earmarked in advance? In the spirit of teaching, let’s begin with a trigger warning: anyone who’s ever struggled to get a film made may find Max Rose a traumatizing experience. First-time writer/director Daniel Noah, who cut his teeth producing indie B-movies, has managed to coax Jerry Lewis out of retirement, attract Dean Stockwell and Claire Bloom in support, and squander them all with an hour and 23 minutes of stunning banality. The masochists fully convinced of Lewis’s awkward genius might find something of value in the film’s radical woodenness, but that would truly be a labor of love.
Lewis plays the title character, a jazz pianist long divested of former glory, waiting out his autumn years somewhere in suburban L.A. We meet Max as he mourns the death of his wife, Eva (Bloom). His son (Kevin Pollak) and grown granddaughter Annie (Kerry Bishé) attempt to console him, but to little avail. A recent discovery fixes his attention: a makeup compact, bearing a cryptic engraving, dated 11/5/59 and addressed to Eva, but signed by a man who is not Max. Thus he finds himself compelled to reflect on his life with Eva, as well as his life in a broader sense which includes having been a less-than-stellar father.
Critiquing Jim Carrey’s dramatic turn in 2001’s The Majestic, Elvis Mitchell commented on how the comedian, eager to honor the film’s seriousness, overcorrects and “drains all the joy out of the role.” In his post-slapstick years, Lewis avoided this temptation by taking roles that leveraged his legacy into either kitsch fantasy, as in 1993’s Arizona Dream, or backstage narratives, as in 1995’s Funny Bones and 1983’s The King of Comedy. The latter in particular deconstructed the Lewis persona – abject, adolescent, artlessly ingratiating – to expose an antisocial flipside much closer to the contempt he was, in his public appearances, increasingly unable to conceal.
In Max Rose, that contempt takes the more odious form of oozing sentimentality. Max befriends a trio of fellow former showbiz types at his retirement home, and in one of several montage sequences – the formal refuge of scoundrels – they pantomime along to a bebop record. Shot from a gaudy low angle, the scene seeks to confer awe upon them. Among them is Mort Sahl, another luminary of the Borscht Belt comedic tradition, and his anguished rictus is telling.
The acting in general runs the gamut from community theater to begrudgingly returning a favor. Bishé is the worst offender, her furrowed brow frozen in place. Pollak is somnambulistic. Dean Stockwell, as the elusive “other man,” furnishes the film with a much needed but short-lived surge of life in the third act. Decked out in paisley robes and eyeliner, beckoning from a four-post deathbed, he seems to have dropped in from another movie entirely, one that knows better than to take this material seriously.
For a film that does take material like this seriously, and does is well, see Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years, a film of boundless sensitivity. Noah’s film, shot and scored like an ad for life insurance, is by contrast too bound up in its pageantry of hokum to ever manage a convincing portrayal of grief. Every beat feels preprogrammed. Eva’s belongings, isolated in racked focus, invariably trigger flashbacks. Annie’s long-distance marriage to a musician is inevitably paralleled with Max’s, and he warns her not to make the same mistakes he did. A piano is left standing in Max’s vacant home, so that he may return and play it, after thinking he had lost the ability.
Noah apparently based the screenplay on his own grandfather, also a pianist and widower. Perhaps a sense of closure really did miraculously restore his musical abilities. It’s a bit less likely that he saw his wife materialize behind his bedroom door as blinding rays of light. But on film, this is all behavior untethered to any real personalities; everyone’s just a vessel for vacuous sap.
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