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Film

A Mid-Life Crisis Befalls an Arch Comedian

The result is 'Top Five,' a film with warmth and levity.

Dorothy Woodend 8 Jan 2015TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about film every other week for The Tyee. Find her previous articles here.

Goddamn January. The bleakest of months is upon us, sleety, shitty weather, and not much to look forward to except the prospect of getting up every day, putting on a coat and boots and grimly trooping off to work to pay the huge bills you racked up at Christmas time.

At this time of year, I find myself drawn to films made in the bright California sunshine or the sweaty funk of summer. It doesn't matter how bad the film is, as long as people are in their shirtsleeves, and the night air looks balmy. Maybe it's the cinematic equivalent of those lamps that emit certain wavelengths of light designed to lift Seasonal Affective Disorder.

If you, gentle readers, are also in need of a bit of levity and warmth, I have just the thing. Chris Rock's film Top Five has been in the theatres for a couple of weeks now, but it has largely been overshadowed by the heavy-hitters of awards season. Comedy doesn't get much respect when it comes to prizes. The heavy, woefully self-serious films are lauded and applauded, while comedies sit at the back of the room, and crack wise.

The films that have made the majority of top ten lists and critic's awards (with the exception of the foreign film contingent which packed in sly humour and genuine glee) are a serious bunch, full of torturous emoting, suffering, killing and dying. Think of dead-eyed Scarlett Johansson tootling about in a pedo-van, picking up unwary punters in Under the Skin. Unbroken, Wild, American Sniper also suffer from endless sodden solemnity. Someone should really take old Clint Eastwood out behind the barn and put him out of his misery. Bring Bradley Cooper along for good measure.

Films that had energy and punch undermined themselves with masturbatory self-seriousness -- Whiplash, I am looking at you honey -- and even films that were supposed to be adventuresome felt like a long hard slog through the mud and the shire. Witness the atrocity that was the interminable, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the film that ended Peter Jackson's epic ring cycle with so much endless banging that you were tempted to crawl under your seat and whimper.

'Top Five' has light and breadth

After a while, you're parched for something that isn't three hours long and entranced with its own portentous bloat. Give me something funny, for Christ's sake, a pinprick to let out the air so that I can breathe again.

Top Five does the trick. Sure it's a bit of a mess, with a story that staggers about like a drunken rhino, but who cares when it has light and breadth, and the ease of great comedy.

It may look easy, but make no mistake, comedy is hard and only the truly gifted practitioners can create this sense of lift. It's taken Rock a while to get here. After two earlier, more lumpen offerings as a director (Head of State and I Think I Love My Wife), Rock appears to have hit his stride with this, his third film. The man has come home again, back to his roots as a standup comedian, and the film traces a similar course throughout the persona of one Andre Allen (played by Rock).

Andre is a comedian in transition, or, more correctly, crisis. He made his fame and fortune playing a character named Hammy the Bear in a series of films that were a box-office bonanza but critical bear bait. The man has bigger ambitions including a new film called Uprize, based on the largest slave rebellion in Haitian history. Despite the fact that giant billboards promoting the film cover the city, audiences would rather see the latest Tyler Perry film.

The autobiographical elements are immediately apparent here, but so are references to the many comedians whose life, ambition and art similarly imploded. Like Dave Chappelle's disappearing act, or Bill Murray's stab at being a serious actor (The Razor's Edge). Andre has left standup behind, maintaining that he doesn't feel funny anymore. But there's more to it than that.

On the day Uprize opens in New York, Andre is on a press junket, part of which entails being tailed by Chelsea Brown, a culture writer from the New York Times (played by Rosario Dawson). Chelsea herself has a few issues and secrets. The premise is established early on, and the film sets off, following along behind Chelsea and Andre as they wander about the city.

In the warm syrupy light of a New York summer, the pair joust and tease, and mostly just talk about family, love, fame and pain. Maybe there is something in the air, but the couple head into confessional territory almost before you know it. Both Andre and Chelsea are alcoholics in recovery, and this aspect of their shared bond is treated alternately with humour and pathos. The incident that prompted Andre to stop drinking comes to life in a particularly vivid flashback. As a young comic, Andre performed at a gig in Houston and presided over a bowler hat-wearing promoter named Jazzy Dee (played with epic bawdiness by Cedric the Entertainer). Old Jazzy promises wine and women and depravity and delivers instead a frightening payload of his own bodily fluids. Such a story prompts Chelsea to up the ante, with her own tale of romantic trials and tribulations involving her boyfriend's anal fixation and hot sauce.

Obscene and hilarious

And so the thing comes to lewd, raunchy life. The best scenes are lightly offered, seemingly riffed off the cuff. The embodiment of this ease and dexterity occurs when Andre returns home for a visit with family and friends. Rock may have stacked the deck here, with performances from Tracy Morgan, Jay Pharoah, Sherri Shepherd and Leslie Jones, who play his cousins, ex-girlfriends and various extended family members, but no matter. There is so much joy to be had in these exchanges, obscene and hilarious, that are offered like trading cards between all of these people, that I wished the film had been all about the language of comedy, this trippingly quick pop of surprise and humour.

It is this scene that gives the film its name, derived from his family and friends' habit of listing their top five rap and hip hop acts and performers in descending order, with a sixth candidate thrown in for good measure. As Chelsea interviews Andre's people, they reveal another side of the man. In effect, an ordinary guy, with some amount of talent, offset by an enormous weight of insecurity and fear.

Andre's departure from standup isn't nearly as clear-cut as he would make it seem. Beneath his ambition to make serious films lurks something far more frightening, namely that without the constant application of alcohol and drugs, he simply isn't funny anymore.

As Chelsea and Andre get more deeply involved, the romantic ante is upped with sexy bathroom make-out sessions, and even more late-night confessions. Everyone has secrets it seems, especially journalists from the New York Times. But before we get to the film's third act, there are plenty more digressions and tangents including an extended riff on Andre's upcoming wedding to reality TV star played by Gabrielle Union, a bachelor party at a strip club featuring more famous cameos than is right or proper, and finally Andre's flip out at a grocery store that lands him in jail. If you want a linear narrative line, it doesn't happen here, but that is okay. There is so much charm and grace notes aplenty that it's hard to begrudge the film its baggy, shaggy dog ways.

While the film careens into its final reel, it reserves a final knock-out punch for its denouement. I will not spoil it for you, but there is one moment in Top Five that is easily worth 10 ponderous war films, or 20 leaden biopics. To paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi, without a sense of humour, we would all have jumped off a building a long time ago.

Ultimately, Top Five is a love song to standup, and all its high wire risk and reward. (There is a lovely little shout-out to New York comedians in the scene where Andre finally takes to the standup stage once more.)

Exploring the inner lives of comedians

The inner and more arcane workings of comedians and how they work have gained prominence recently. The rise of Louis CK and his brethren have pulled back the curtain on how comedy works, and how carefully and precisely fashioned is the wordplay that makes standup sing and spark. I watch standup on a regular basis precisely for this reason, to listen, witness and marvel at the skill on display. But also to understand how attention to timing, to nuances of inflection, colour, vocabulary; all add up to something far greater than the sum of its parts.

Comedians talking to other comedians about their craft may seem a bit inside baseball, but there is something important to be gained, which is ultimately just that: truth.

British standup Stewart Lee, in a recent profile piece in the Guardian, talks about how comedians are perceived to be different from actors or other artists in that they are service providers, meaning they are there to provide an outlet, not unlike a plumber who provides a form of maintenance, keeping things open and clear. The historical precedents of comedy as a form of social inversion and catharsis, from All Fools Day to the Roman celebration of Hilaria are well known.

I think there's another reason that people are drawn to standup comedy. It is one of the few places where observations about how humans and the world they have made for themselves are spoken out loud.

In the case of comedians like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Stewart Lee or even, I have to say, Russell Brand, who have wandered into the political realm, this has become more than making observations about the lunacy of much of the modern world. Although it also extremely necessary, comedy now seems to teeter on becoming a political movement. Whether this is good or bad, it is also kind of funny on its very own.

In reading Brand's editorial in the New Statesman from a while back, one bit popped out, when he writes about the real job of comedians: "I did a job with Billy Connolly and Eddie Izzard not long ago and the three of us shared a dressing room. Eddie believes in democracy and spoke sincerely of his political ambitions. 'One day I'd like to be a politician... ' he said. I spoke of my belief that change could only come from within. 'I'd like to be a spiritual orator... ' I said grandly.

"Billy eyed us both, with kindly disapprobation. 'I'd like to be a nuisance,' he said. 'I want to be a troublemaker, there in the gallery in Parliament shouting RUBBISH and PROVE IT.' Who am I to argue with The Great Trickster Connolly? I will never vote and I don't think you should, either."

Although he has been less than overt over the years about the state of the world, Rock too seems to have found a new passion for speaking out. Top Five contains observations about the state of race relations in the U.S., culture, politics, class and privilege that are often slipped in sideways. Jokes can operate a bit like stealth bomb, entering your head and exploding internally before you even realized what has happened. So it is here as well.

In this awards season, where films like American Sniper are taken seriously, there needs to be someone piping up asking "Is this a joke?" I wish that it were. But no, apparently, in this day and age, filmmakers still think it's a fine idea to make a movie where American soldiers shoot women and children from a safe distance. As only a few critics have noted, Eastwood was careful to excise most of the ridiculous claims that Chris Kyle made in his autobiography including brawls with Jesse Ventura, being hired as a sniper to shoot looters during Hurricane Katrina, or this immortal quote: "I don't shoot people with Qu'rans. I'd like to, but I don't."

Hilarious? Not really.  [Tyee]

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