A Futile and Stupid Gesture
The National Lampoon did the comedy forever. The magazine and movies like “Animal House” and “Caddyshack” alone should tell you how much influence they had on all modern comedies, but especially those of writer/actor/director David Wain’s ilk. A member of “The State” and one of the creators behind “Wet Hot American Summer,” Wain has always worked in the realm of what could be called “comedy ensembles,” bringing the same people together over and over again while often satirizing expectations of the genre, as he did with his rom com spoof, the underrated “They Came Together.”
Is he too straight a man for National Lampoon? Is that why “A Futile & Stupid Gesture,” to borrow its own phrase, is full of likable funny people who aren’t all that funny or likable? Because it’s too close to home? There’s some hero worship going on here that deflates the piece, and Wain’s direction is surprisingly uninspired, but both pale in comparison to a script that tries to cover too much ground but doesn’t have all that much to say. There’s a scene early on in this telling of the rise of National Lampoon that says it all about where writers John Aboud and Michael Colton are coming from.
They’re sitting around tossing out ideas when Tony Hendra (Matt Lucas) offers up a dull one drawing Nixon with Pinocchio’s nose. For some reason I couldn’t get past this bad joke that nearly got Hendra run out of the room because it was so obvious Nixon is a liar and too much of “A Futile & Stupid Gesture” feels similarly paint by numbers when it comes to conveying its history. The story of Doug Kenney (Will Forte) and the ascendance of National Lampoon is told almost entirely through narration and montage; it’s a Greatest Hits collection, hitting the beats that anyone who saw “Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead” already knows, and doing so incredibly superficially.
The best thing about Wain’s movie is its casting; there’s not a weak link in the bunch here (including one brilliant piece of meta analysis), but that only gets a film so far. Kenney took the Harvard Lampoon through perhaps its most successful phase, turning it into an international phenomenon with his partner in crime Henry Beard (Domhnall Gleeson, giving the most grounded and interesting performance in the film despite an awful wig.)
When they get to New York and found the magazine, Wain’s film races through about a decade of history from the first days of groundbreaking comedy through the movies and right up to Kenney’s death in 1980. We meet seemingly every major comedian from this era including Gilda Radner (Jackie Tohn), Bill Murray (Jon Daly), John Landis (Brian Huskey), John Belushi (John Gemberling), Christopher Guest (Seth Green), and the one and only Chevy Chase, played by his “Community” co-star Joel McHale, with whom he had a notoriously contentious on set relationship.
Imagine playing one of your least favorite co-workers in a movie. McHale doesn’t go for parody; he nails Chase’s rhythms and comedic timing, although it’s telling that Chase is portrayed here is something of an enabler for his best buddy when it comes to drugs.
Martin Mull is playing the older version of Doug Kenney, but that’s kind of a crazy choice because he died when he was 36. Is Mull supposed to be Kenney from beyond the grave? No, it’s just a lazy narrative device that lets Kenney comment on his own story from afar when Forte could have done these fourty wall breaks just as effectively. It’s like they wanted to get Mull in there and all the other parts were taken.
And it’s frustrating because this is way more Kenney’s story than Lampoon. Yes, Kenney is an important voice in comedy, but there’s a different version of this that gives equal weight to both sides and that would be more interesting.
But worst of all, “A Futile and Stupid Gesture” can’t stick with its irreverent, NL-inspired tone throughout Wain can’t handle the serious stuff; you get the sense he’d rather be hanging out in the writer’s room or behind the scenes of the radio show than dealing with Kenney’s drug addiction and infidelities.
The superficial reimagining of comedy highlights is kind of fun in a “The Chris Farley Show” way (“Remember that food fight? That was awesome.”) but that tone doesn’t work at all when the movie has to be even remotely serious. There’s a point where Kenney says “Comedy doesn’t have to be pretty. It should be fucking raw.” I wish this movie was too, in how it handles both comedy and misery.
Watch A Futile and Stupid Gesture For Free On Solarmovies.