The Great Buck Howard
Written and directed by Sean McGinly. With Colin Hanks, John Malkovich, Emily Blunt, Adam Scott, Ricky Jay, and Steve Zahn. (PG)
Like the down-at-heel performer at its center, The Great Buck Howard is a bit threadbare, a bit shopworn, but still manages to muster up the magic of a great performance when it counts. It is, ironically, a film that earnestly makes the case for the intimacy of small-audience live performance, suggesting that—at least for a certain type of performer—a wider commercial success spells a kind of artistic death.
John Malkovich stars as "The Great" Buck Howard, an aging mentalist—don't call him a magician—whose 61 appearances on The Tonight Show remain the touchstone of his career decades after his last spot on the show. "You have to say 'with Johnny Carson,'" he explains, eager to distance himself from the era of Jay Leno, a man Buck describes as "Satan" when a chance at a comeback is thwarted by an overlong interview with a babbling Tom Arnold. (While Leno may get points for appearing in the film, one can't help but feel that Howard is in the right.)
Into the dust of Howard's career steps law school drop-out Troy Gable (Colin Hanks), an aspiring writer who answers Buck's ad for a personal assistant, hoping that life as a road manager will give him raw material for a book. Together they travel a circuit of dingy theaters, where Buck performs feats of mind-reading and hypnotism, and, as the capper to his act, has the audience hide the night's box office take in the auditorium; if he's unable to find it, he performs for free. (Like much of Howard's story, that particular stunt is inspired by The Amazing Kreskin, the mentalist and Tonight Show stalwart; writer/director Sean McGinly worked as his road manager in the '90s.)
The pair seem destined to ride out the fading arc of Buck's professional life when an unexpected crisis gives his career a surprising jump-start. (McGinly, no doubt used to using the press during his days with Kreskin, pokes gentle fun at its inexorable attraction to any hint of tragedy.) But for Troy, what's more surprising is the realization that Buck, for all his delusions of grandeur, might actually be happier on one of life's smaller stages.
The Great Buck Howard, like the performances it presents, can seem over-rehearsed, especially in the romantic subplot between Troy and boozy public relations agent Valerie (Emily Blunt). But if their relationship smacks of convenient plotting, Hanks and Malkovich manage to evoke something that approaches a father-son bond—all the more remarkable given that Hanks' famous father Tom also appears in the film, playing Troy's father. Both we and Buck understand that Troy will eventually outgrow his time on the road; it's the wonder of watching Buck charm the crowds—not the high rollers and honeymooners of Vegas, but the Ohioans who saved to buy a ticket—that gives the film its real magic. "I love this town!" Buck cries from the stage; in a wonderful twist, it's only late in the film that we realize just how much he means it, and how much that means to us.
*
Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
Directed by Kevin Rafferty. With Brian Dowling, J.P. Goldsmith, Tommy Lee Jones, Frank Champi, and Vic Gatto. (NR)
In the annals of Ivy League football history, the Harvard vs. Yale rivalry is legendary. Within it, one game from November of 1968 has lodged itself in the collective consciousness of the two schools—a game of dramatic turnarounds and last-minute heroics that made for what may be the most exciting game in the history of Ivy League schools. Whether or not that means anything to you may well depend on your interest in the gridiron—or at least your tolerance of its use as metaphor.
Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 is Kevin Rafferty's documentary about that historic November game. Taking place in the era of so much societal change—the war in Vietnam was churning away, Nixon was on his way to inauguration—the game, or, as the schools narcissistically referred to it, "The Game," has come to stand, in hindsight, for far more than yardage and touchdowns. No small effort is spared comparing the blue-collar backgrounds of the Harvard crew to the blue-blood legacies of the heavily favored Yale squad. Both sides can lay claim to some heavyweights: Hollywood star Tommy Lee Jones was both a Harvard tackle and roommate to Al Gore; his Yale counterpart was a roommate of George W. Bush.
Rafferty spends the first two-thirds of the film exploring the differences between the schools; we learn that the Yale quarterback Brian Dowling—an amazing athlete who hadn't lost a game since the seventh grade—was the inspiration for the "B.D." character in fellow student Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip, and that another Yalie was dating the young Meryl Streep. Harvard's squad hosted an ex-Marine and a backup quarterback whose Boston accent was so thick his teammates couldn't understand his directions.
It's all good fun for a while, and if you're a student of football it will almost surely stay that way until the end, when a literal last second play changes the game. But for most, the promise of the era—the promise of real change—will likely be lost in the reminiscences of a largely forgotten contest, most often recalled for reasons of vanity. For the players, it seems—and probably rightly so—it was still just a game, not the groundwork for a film.
*
Also this week: Oliver Parker's 1995 film Othello screens at Amherst Cinema as part of the AC's ongoing Shakespeare in Film series. Starring Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh as Othello and Iago, Parker's film leans on the visual and sexual vibrancy of its actors to a larger degree than its predecessors, creating a film that, while perhaps lacking some of the subtlety of its forbears, compensates for that deficiency with a visceral tone that helps connect the Bard to a new generation of filmgoers. Unspooling on Sunday and Thursday, the film at its weekend screening will be accompanied by an introduction and discussion by Arthur F. Kinney, Director of the Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Nathaniel Leonard, Associate Director of the Renaissance Center Theater Company.
Also in Amherst, "imagemaker" Lucien Castaing-Taylor will appear on April 13 in a free event showcasing Sheep Rushes, a series of films, photos and videos. Together with Ilisa Barbash, Harvard-based Castaing-Taylor has worked for years to produce "an unsentimental elegy to the American West" set primarily in the Absaroka Beartooth mountains of Montana. Judging by the press—"a sensorial evocation of a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, climate and landscape, and vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed"—any fan of PBS should check it out.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com
