My Week in Film #7

I watched two films this week, the first of which was Richard Curtis’ The Boat That Rocked, followed by Adam McKay’s Step Brothers. The cumbersomely titled The Boat That Rocked was showing in a very pleasant little cinema in Ambleside named Zeffirellis. Spread over two sites and showing a considerable amount of films over four screens, it was an endearing venue with an obviously dedicated local following. Key in its appeal was the showing of an amusing independent short prior to the main event, concerning a lonely young man on a train. Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to find the details of this film, though I have emailed the cinema in an effort to find them out. Stay tuned.

The Boat That Rocked is about an offshore pirate radio station, Radio Rock and the misadventures of its staff and crew and the government’s attempts to shut it down. Boasting an impressive cast, including Bill Nighy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Nick Frost and Kenneth Brannagh (who stands out as the funniest thing in the film) among many others, the quality of the players is the film’s strongest asset. The film is solidly shot and the set and costume design is convincingly 1966. There also a couple of half decent set pieces, both comedic and dramatic, including a sequence towards the end involving a box of records (to say much more could be a bit spoilery). Unfortunately, this is about all the good there is to say about the film.

The Boat That Rocked is very flawed in more ways than one. Crucially though, its biggest sin is that for a so-called comedy, it really isn’t very funny. At all. The majority of the humour derives from cheap innuendo, pratfalls and daft insults disguised as ‘witty banter’, only the previously mentioned Brannagh proving anywhere near smirk-worthy. The script too, is problematic, feeling like a second draft rather than a finished article. Characters appear in and out of the narrative seemingly at random. Events are said to be occurring in the future only to happen in the next scene. Plot strands are picked up and dropped with reckless abandon. Annoyingly, the majority of characters are pretty likable but are let down by the cobbled together plot. Whilst this is postulation on my part, I believe that the biggest problem is Tom Sturridge’s lead character Carl. I got the feeling that he had been added to the film for the audience’s ‘benefit’, a point of normality for viewers to experience the array of wacky characters, something that really is not necessary. I’m guessing that before Carl’s inclusion, the film would have been a series of loosely linked, semi-amusing skits. Now, burdened with a lead character, the script obviously must adorn said lead with some sort of goal, you know, for narrative cohesion, such as finding his father, getting a girl, finding a place in the world or discovering the ‘meaning of rock’. Bizarrely, Curtis goes with not one but all of the above, resulting in a lot of crammed in story at the climax and about 452 endings. My point being that the film would have been more palatable without an attempt to create a traditional A to B storyline around it; as it is, attempts to straighten out the plot only confuse things further.

Ultimately though, perhaps this isn’t the kind of film that is designed for strict critical scrutiny (it certainly doesn’t stand up to it). Rather, this is a film for disengaging brain and feeling good, which is all very well, but I was expecting a bit more. It wasn’t for me.

Step Brothers, by comparison, is much funnier. Suffering less than expected for being a pretty formulaic Will Ferrell movie (the man practically a genre in himself), Step Brothers is about two middle aged men who still live with their parents. The parents get married and Ferrell and cohort John C Reilly find themselves as unwilling roommates. Perhaps the best aspect of the film is Ferrell and Reilly’s worryingly precise portrayal of pre-adolescent boys, their tantrums and one-up-man-ship antics hitting the nail rather pointedly on the head.

At times, the supporting cast threaten to out-shine our two leads; Adam Scott in particular, as Ferrell’s god-awful younger brother, gives unsettlingly good comedic performance. The film could perhaps be improved by some slightly more aggressive editing to reign in some of Ferrell and Reilly’s more indulgent improvisation, but, while it is not as outrageously hilarious as Anchorman, intriguing as Stranger Than Fiction or as undeniably charming as Elf, one thing you can say for Ferrell’s output, as exemplified by Step Brothers, is that it is nothing if not consistent, and consistently funny at that. An example that Richard Curtis would do well to learn from.