Pizza
and ice cream are a good combination.
Slacker man-children and family responsibility—not so much. There is your take-away from Bob Byington’s
emotionally frozen comedy Somebody Up
There Likes Me (trailer
here), which
opens tomorrow at BAM.
Max
carries his father’s legacy in a suitcase.
Whenever he peeks inside it glows.
Whether or not it is Marsellus Wallace’s soul, it seems to keep him
looking youthful. Unfortunately, he is
not exactly young in spirit, having largely disengaged from the world around
him. He makes a stab at patching things
up with his ex-wife, but her rejection hardly fazes him. For the next thirty-five years, his life will
revolve around people he knows from his crummy steakhouse job, including his
best (and only) friend Sal, and Lyla, the “breadstick girl” whom he will
eventually marry.
Time
flashes forward in chunks. Max has a son
he is not interested in and passively watches his fortunes rise and fall
(including the establishment of a chain of pizza and ice cream restaurants). Fundamentally a jerkheel, he will even start
carrying on with the nanny, which would be something of a cliché if he were not
so indifferent to everything and everyone.
Essentially,
Somebody is like the indie version of
Adam Sandler’s Click, except Max
really wants to fast forward through family life. It is also mordantly witty at times. Not surprisingly, Parks & Recreation’s Nick Offerman scores most (if not all) of
the laughs as the sardonic Sal. Jess
Weixler adds a rather odd texture, portraying Lyla in an apparent state of
arrested development. Character actor Marshall
Bell does his thing, glowering and growling as Lyla’s corrupt copper
father. However, as Max, Keith Poulson
is only required to hit one note—extreme detachment—and hold it from start to
finish.
