Lost in America

'Brooklyn' is a modern classic, 'Entertainment' is ponderous and unfunny

Stranger in a strange land

Despite being set in the ‘50s during a somewhat hagiographic era when New York was the greatest city in the world, and despite being about an angelic Irish immigrant, it’s difficult to look at director John Crowley’s “Brooklyn” without thinking about the complexities of modern immigration. Though Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) is on a journey far less fraught with misery and peril than that of many desperate people seeking shelter in the U.S. today, her story tells of a country of immigrants who’ve become natives, and sometimes nativist. It’s the story of America, then and now. 

Eilis, an Irish teenager living with her sister Rose (Fiona Glascott) and aging mother (Jane Brennan), longs to escape the staid tradition and suffocating people of her small town. Opportunity presents itself when Father Flood (Jim Broadbent, delightful as always) offers Eilis a chance to emigrate from Ireland to Brooklyn to attend an all-girls boarding school run by Flood. 

It’s over a half-century after the bloody battles of Five Points, and the Irish are in the club.   “We need more Irish girls,” Flood assures the newly-arrived Eilis, poised and distant even as she’s in the throes of terrible homesickness. She finds a job at a high-end department store, and her obvious intellect compels Flood to pay for bookkeeping classes. 

The homesickness evaporates when she meets Tony (Emory Cohen), a working class Italian kid in business with his father but lacking book smarts, at a church-sponsored dance.  Tony, infatuated with Emerald Isle girls, is immediately smitten by Eilis, who is happily overwhelmed by her budding good fortune. But just as she begins to believe Brooklyn is home, the old one calls her back.

Based on Colm Tóibín’s critically-acclaimed novel (adapted by Nick Hornby), “Brooklyn” is a modern classic, infused with larger themes of actualization that go beyond the tropes of the immigrant experience—here, Eilis is trying to shed her Irish-ness, not hold onto it. 

The entire cast is a buffet of delights, but Saoirse Ronan is miraculous. Her beauty is almost alien, recalling Audrey Hepburn in her best moments, while defining the rest on her own. She’s in practically every scene, and carries the film with a sense of composure and attention to detail that feels beyond her years. She was already the best thing about the otherwise awful “The Lovely Bones” and she kills (literally) in Joe Wright’s under-seen action fantasy, “Hanna.” If she isn’t up for an Oscar now, something is wrong with this world.

Crowley’s direction indelibly captures the seminal cornerstones of Eilis’s journey in a new world from wallflower to womanhood, while fashioning a tangible universe for the rest of us. The beautifully executed period setting offers an evocative look at an era when America was still a proud beacon of hope for those escaping the castes they were born into. 

Eilis’s story isn’t just a character arc, it’s a statement about why these tales are told, ensconced in a crowd-pleasing character drama about the possibilities life can offer anyone when they give it—and themselves—a chance.          

The one about the sad comedian

Neil Hamburger is the Neil Hamburger of comedy. If there’s such a thing as an acquired taste, that’s its name. I say that more as an admirer than a fan. I just can’t help but have respect for any serious comedian. No matter how much (or little) I like the material, they are still doing something that I only dream of doing.

To adherents of the absurdist sketch comedy of “Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job!” or to anyone who’s been paying attention to the hinterlands of that realm since the ‘90s, Neil Hamburger (Gregg Turkington) is probably best known as an Andy Kaufman-esque anti-comedian. 

A loser in a sad tux and granny glasses, hair plastered in a comb-over of Brill cream branches, he looks for laughs through making the crowd as uncomfortable as possible. His shtick boils down to telling shitty jokes with the assurance of a man who can barely exist in society, while scolding the audience over their lack of appreciation for the obvious gift he’s giving them—a gift they’re likely too dumb to understand anyway. Which often turns out to be surprisingly funny. 

But if that’s what you’re looking for in “Entertainment,” writer/director Rick Alverson’s exploration of life on the road with a super depressed comedian, you should look elsewhere.

Hamburger/Turkington plays The Comedian. All we ever learn about him comes during his 3^rd act life, touring across the Mojave Desert (where he finds that the prison crowds are more forgiving than barflies). He has a daughter who he’s desperately trying to reconnect with through a series of unreturned phone messages. He runs across a sweet-natured cousin (John C. Reilly) who’s supportive, even though he doesn’t quite get it. And then there’s the private party gig in the Hollywood Hills that is sure to be his big break.

And that’s kind of it. There’s essentially no plot to “Entertainment”—an obvious anti-title—which would be fine if it amounted to any kind of catharsis on a comedic or dramatic level. The theme, at least, is hammered home. Being The Comedian sucks. Obviously.

In fairness, the track record for good movies about comedians is pretty spotty. At worst you get films like “Punchline” which unrealistically glamorized the craft (thanks to the explosion of stand-up at the time) without writing funny material for its actors. At best you get Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy,” which actually understood how ruthless that world can be and turned it into blazing satire.

“Entertainment” lies somewhere between the nihilism of Bobcat Goldthwait’s superior “Shakes the Clown” and the existential pondering of a wannabe Jim Jarmusch film. 

Alverson (writing with three others, including Tim Heidecker) seems intent on hammering home the parallels of the literal desert and The Comedian’s internal desolation. But we never find out why his daughter will have nothing to do with him. Vignettes in sterile roadside bathrooms—one where The Comedian helps a pregnant woman who heckled him, another where he seems like he might want to kill Michael Cera (who I’d hoped was trying to blow him for gas money)—are largely pointless and, like the film itself, offer no resolution to any of the ideas they introduce. While Alverson evokes an often-dreadful vibe thanks to Turkington’s solid performance, Robert Donne’s tense score and Lorenzo Hagerman’s chilly cinematography, I kept expecting the simmering tension to build into a cathartic moment that, ultimately, never takes the stage.

For more from Joe, read his reviews of "Love" and "Suffragette."