newcritics

First and best thing to be said about The Amateurs is that it stars Jeff Bridges.

Bridges is the one of the very best leading actors working in movies today, if not the best—the moment in Fisher King when his disc jockey character realizes what a real life horror he’s caused by some careless spouting off he did on the radio and Bridges slowly slides his hand over his mouth as if to shut himself up forever would be Exhibit A if I was going to make the case that he ranks below nobody but De Niro.  And someday, when Turner Classic Movies or AMC devotes a week to showing The Last Picture Show, Fat City, Hearts of the West, Cutter’s Way, Starman, The Fabulous Baker Boys, American Heart, Fisher King, Fearless, The Contender, Seabiscuit, and, of course, The Big Lebowski, we’ll all gasp collectively and wonder why we weren’t paying closer attention!  What were we thinking in the 70s and 80s, making stars out of the likes of Ford, Cruise, Stallone, Caan, Quaid, Costner, even Hanks, while taking this guy for granted and ignoring his movies and letting them languish at the box office.  There’ll be a rush to compile a list of his second-best films, the little gems that were good but not great movies and worth watching if just for having Bridges in them, like Bad Company, Winter Kills, Rancho-Deluxe, Tucker, Texasville, and Wild Bill—and The Amateurs probably won’t be on the list.

That’s too bad.

Bridges plays Andy Sargentee, a small-town dreamer so focused on whatever get rich quick scheme he’s concocted that he can hardly feel himself existing the present moment.  Consequently, he has a tendency to lose track of what’s going on around him—two years after his wife’s moved out on him he’s surprised to learn that his house has a linen closet in which she left him a month’s supply of clean sheets.  "I have a linen closet?  I have sheets?"  Andy’s a cheerful screw-up, so prone to counting his chickens before they hatch that he quits job after job the moment he comes up with a new plan for making the big money. It should be said that he has a very modest definition of big money and what he wants most is to feel the sense of pride from having done something.  So far in his life all he can take pride in is having tried.

Nonetheless he is a hero to his friends and even to his ex-wife who love and admire him for trying.  None of them can pull themselves together to try, let alone get something done.  His ex-wife (Jeanne Tripplehorn) left because she was tired of trying along with him.  She didn’t have the energy required to keep getting her hopes up or the resilience to bounce back with him after each fresh failure.  She has had the good luck to stumble into a second marriage with a decent man who has already done something, but that only increases her admiration for Andy; although she is realistic enough to never be tempted to return to Andy, her accomplished new husband has convinced her that Andy could do the something he wants to do, and she can’t help but root him on from the stands, even when his latest scheme is to make a feature-length amateur pornographic movie starring the whole town of Butterface Fields.

The next good thing to be said about The Amateurs is the completely nonjudgmental attitude it takes towards Andy’s new career as a pornographer, and I mean there is no judgment either way—there’s no attempt to make us think porn is a corrosive and corrupting societal evil, no high-minded reverse Puritanism trying to convince us that porn is a positive or at least not-harmful medium for personal pleasure.  Porn is just there, something people watch and enjoy, or watch and don’t enjoy, or don’t watch because they wouldn’t enjoy it or don’t watch because they’re afraid they would enjoy it, but whatever they do with it or think about it, as far as Andy’s concerned it’s just something enough people want to spend money on that he might be able to use it to make himself and his friends a small fortune.

And that’s the attitude towards the film being filmed within the film that writer and director Michael Traeger wants us to take.  Our rooting interest is not in seeing the sex scenes being shot or in seeing the finished product but in just seeing it finished.  We want to see Andy and his five best friends who are his crew do this one right.

There’s no leering or winking or pretending to be shocked while being titilating in the sex scene-sex scenes either.  The most difficult task for Andy is casting.  Lots of people like to watch, very few want to do, not on camera any way, but again there’s no judgment here.  Those who turn down parts in the film aren’t presented as being either prudish or principled.  They’re just themselves.  Those who agree to perform, including the still miraculously goddess-like Valerie Perrine and Judy Greer as an enthusiastically bisexual experimentalist who kindly and generously jumps at the chance to be in the film so that she can fulfill her boss’s’ fantasy of doing it with another woman, are just shown to be themselves too.  They’re neither sluts nor bold free spirits.  People have different ideas of fun and different levels of modesty too, that’s all.

When Andy’s friend Barney (Other characters are named Otis, Floyd, Emmett, and Howard.  Name the TV show being honored here.) in a fit of guilt and love destroys the footage of the woman he loves demonstrating a variety of sex toys he’s not doing it because he’s decided porn is wicked or that she’s too much of an angel to dirty herself that way.  He does it because he feels guilty for having talked her it, knowing that she didn’t want to do it.   And in the scene of her about to begin her "demonstration" the grief and self-loathing that we can see tearing her apart, but which the guys shooting the scene are oblivious to, aren’t caused by any attack of modesty or morals.  It’s not that she’s about to do porn that’s upsetting her.  There’s a side of her that’s even, well, not looking forward to it, but curious.  It’s the bad decisions she’s made and foolish romantic pipe-dreams she’s indulged that have put her in the position of needing the money she’s being paid that have her hating herself.

In The Amateurs pornography isn’t anything compared to life itself which just shouldn’t be so hard and unfair to such nice and harmless people as Andy and his friends.

Should note here that the movie is forgiving towards its characters’ faults and flaws but it isn’t at all blind to them.  Life is unfair and they’ve been unlucky, but a lot of the reason it’s been so hard for them is that they’ve kept making the same dumb mistakes over and over again.  That’s why Andy’s their hero.  He makes new and original mistakes.  And they’re convinced that one of these days he’s going to help them find a way to break the cycle of their own self-inflicted repeating misfortunes.

Barney and his lady-love are played by Tim Blake Nelson and Glenne Headly, which brings me to the next thing that has to be said about The Amateurs.  It has a terrific cast.

In addition to Bridges, Tripplehorn, Headly, Nelson, Perrine, and Greer, there’s Joe Pantoliano as a photo-booth clerk who knows his destiny is to be a great writer-director, Ted Danson doing an alternately heart-wrenching and cringe-inducing take on Sam Malone for anyone who thinks that in real life guys like Sammy are compensating for something, future star of a great comedy yet to be made Patrick Fugit, an absolutely luminous Lauren Graham, and a sadly nearly unrecognizable Eileen Brennan who despite being sick and in terrible pain while making the movie turned in a hilarious nearly wordless performance as Pantoliano’s doting, and dotty, mother—all Brennan’s work takes place in the background and off to the edges of every scene she’s in, but somehow you pick up on her no matter the focus of the shot.  It’s scene-stealing by stealth and it’s a kick to watch her do it, all the more so because her co-stars are all expert scene-stealers themselves; it’s like watching the world’s most talented pick-pocket work a crowd of other pick-pockets.

And there’s a nice cameo by that favorite of all the Mannionites who took part in the Studio 60 live-blogging last year, Steven Weber, aka Jack Rudolph, Action Executive.

But the revelation to me was William Fichtner as Otis the church janitor who owes his lowly and desperate station in life to his being the most relentlessly, brutally, and compulsively honest man in town.  He knows what’s right and what’s wrong with everyone, and he can’t help telling them.  But the person he’s most honest about is himself, making the case that one of the key qualities of a successful person is a large capacity for self-delusion.  When Otis asks for a job on the movie he’s careful not to request anything that would require real talent or skill because he knows he doesn’t have any of either.  "Is there a guy on a movie," he asks Andy, "whose job is to just stand around?"

He’s made executive-producer.

Fichtner handles Otis’s merciless truth-telling with a mixture of anger and self-loathing that is somehow charming and admirable and necessary because it both keeps his friends grounded in reality when they are about to float away on the balloons of their dreams and keeps them going when after crashing to earth they are tempted by despair into giving up.

Beyond that there’s not much to The Amateurs.  It’s a slight, if pleasant, film, and I only recommend it to die-hard fans of Jeff Bridges, great ensemble work, the Northern Exposure School of Film and Television making—ensemble dramadies set in impossibly crotchety and eccentric small towns—Glenne Headly’s spectacular cleavage, and the idea of Judy Greer getting her thong spanked by another woman.

The Amateurs will be available on DVD Tuesday, February 12, 2008.

The Amateurs was made and even released in some places under the title The Moguls.  Written and directed by Michael Traeger.  Starring Jeff Bridges, Tim Blake Nelson, Joe Pantoliano, Ted Danson, Isiah Washington, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Lauren Graham, Valerie Perrine, Patrick Fugit, Steven Weber, and Eileen Brennan.  First Look Pictures. 2007.

Jeff Bridges has a pretty cool webpage.

Here are my own candidates for a Jeff Bridges Film Fest .

Cross-posted at my place.