deadCenter Review: ‘The Extra Man’
“The Extra Man”
Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini
Husband and wife team Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who directed the wonderful “American Splendor” in 2003, have a knack for combining the ordinary and the strange, and they do so impeccably in “The Extra Man,” an exceedingly smart and hilarious comedy of contradictions. Jonathan Ames joins the duo in adapting his novel for the screen.
Kevin Kline does his best comedic work since “A Fish Called Wanda” as Henry Harrison, a self-styled cultured aristocrat who nevertheless drives a dilapidated deathtrap on wheels and possesses embarrassingly backward opinions about just about everything. Paul Dano stars as Louis Ives, an aspiring writer who thinks of himself as a dapper character in a Fitzgerald novel, but is rather shellshocked by everything around him.
Louis begins renting a room in Henry’s apartment, and the two become friends despite their respective secrets. Henry is an “extra man,” a kind of escort for elderly and wealthy debutantes, while Louis is a budding cross-dresser. Henry lets Louis in on his secret; Louis does not reciprocate voluntarily.
“The Extra Man” is bursting at the seams with eccentricities, both in terms of its characters and its occurrences, but the film avoids ever becoming too precious, self-aware or smug. It owes plenty of genuinely funny moments to both its verbal and physical wit — mostly from Kline, but even when it seems like it’s overdone it (John C. Reilly plays a bearded neighbor with a ridiculous falsetto speaking voice), the humor comes around to make sense in context.
Katie Holmes gets kind of shoehorned in as one of Louis’s coworkers, but the film certainly doesn’t overuse her or her vaguely hippie-ish lifestyle to become icons of quirk. Instead, the film is at turns both solemn and wacky, restrained and unabashedly uninhibited. “The Extra Man” should be full of indie-film contrivances, but Berman and Pulcini know just when to take a left turn.
The film, picked up by Magnolia Pictures and scheduled for a late July theatrical release, is well-worth seeking out in theaters.
Grade: 3 1/2 out of 4 Stars
-Dusty
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