The title of Barry Levinson’s new movie, What Just Happened, is not phrased as a question, but if it were it would demand another question in response: “Who cares?” I’m asking in earnest. Who, exactly, do Levinson and the screenwriter, Art Linson, expect to invest time and interest — to say nothing of thought or feeling — in this meandering, passive-aggressive comedy of Hollywood inconsequence?
It’s not as though the filmmakers themselves show much passion for the project beyond an evident love of the music of Ennio Morricone, a fondness for filming Los Angeles neighborhoods and Cannes hotels through the windows of moving cars, and a salutary appreciation of the efforts of a handful of first-rate actors. As it follows Ben, a harried movie producer played by Robert De Niro, through his complicated routines, What Just Happened achieves a tone of shrugging, studious detachment.
Clearly the picture’s dry, cynical humor is intended as evidence of its satirical bona fides. Its knowing, understated mockery of movie-business business as usual is also a badge of authenticity. What Just Happened, populated by finely etched caricatures of anxious agents, preening directors and tantrum-prone stars (including Bruce Willis playing himself with a beard), knows what it’s about, but this may not be such an impressive achievement.
Levinson, after all, is a veteran not only of Hollywood but of Hollywood satire (Wag the Dog), and Linson has had a long, eclectic career as a producer, with credits including Car Wash, The Untouchables and Fight Club. If the two of them can’t make a realistic movie about moviemaking, who can? And surely the members of the cast, which includes Catherine Keener (as a studio boss), John Turturro (as an agent), Robin Wright Penn (as an ex-wife) and Sean Penn (as himself with a moustache), have ample firsthand knowledge of the ecosystem whose colorful species they lampoon.
The lampooning is sometimes funny and occasionally offers up a tidbit of small truth. But much of it is awfully familiar. The kind of self-flattering entertainment-industry self-mockery that What Just Happened offers has become a staple of the entertainment industry, animating everything from Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm to Tropic Thunder. It is now routine for movie-world insiders to send up their own vanity and self-absorption by reproducing it with just enough exaggeration to make the rest of us feel like insiders too.
It’s not a bad feeling — just, at this point, a little empty and ritualistic. De Niro, his brows knit somewhere between irritation and sincere concern, his face roughened by silvery stubble, is fun to watch. He’s such a nimble, subtle comedian when he wants to be that you can only wish he wanted to be more often.
As Ben ricochets between flailing projects, ex-wives and awkward meetings, muttering into his hands-free cellphone earpiece, he proves that narcissism loves company. And De Niro, mixing it up with his co-stars — with Turturro at a nail salon; with Willis on set; with Wright Penn in what Ben calls his “ex-bed” — he strikes a few sparks of genuine comic insight.
But What Just Happened, for all the trompe-l’oeil accuracy of its situations and locations, serves up far too many warmed-over morsels of humor: the Hollywood funeral where expressions of grief take second place to schmoozing and BlackBerrying; the preening, unstable British auteur (Michael Wincott, following in the footsteps of Steve Coogan and Richard E. Grant); the icy studio boss; the lunches and test screenings and meetings and awkward social encounters. We’ve seen all of this before — though maybe not with Bruce Willis in a yarmulke — and I suspect that only someone who lived in or near this world would want to see it all again.
And even in that case, maybe not so ardently. To come back to the question I began with, the most striking (and perhaps the most revealing) aspect of What Just Happened is its lack of conviction. Its point — that the daily personal and professional habits of the Hollywood elite are silly and solipsistic — is easy enough to grasp and to accept. But true satire works correctively and by antithesis, arriving at an implication of virtue through the faithful representation of vice.
In other words, it is not enough to expose shallowness and duplicity unless you have some notion of what depth or honesty might look like. And this movie fails to be as funny as it should be because it has no idea of what to take seriously. Setting out to skewer the triviality of the movie business, Levinson and Linson have made a trivial movie. Which may only be to say that What Just Happened fulfills its ambitions perfectly.
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