BEFORE: I'm due back at the Tribeca Film Festival today, tomorrow is the last day of the festival but today is my last shift. So I won't be home until very late tonight, I may have to post late. There's a whole different vibe at the festival since there are just a few screenings left, it's not too crowded and an even odder mix of celebrities is expected to show up today. I just want to get through my 14 or 15-hour shift and then re-assess things.
Eddie Murphy carries over again from "Mr. Church".
THE PLOT: After stretching the truth on a deal with a spiritual guru, literary agent Jack McCall finds a Bodhi tree on his property. Its appearance holds a valuable lesson on the consequences of every word he speaks.
AFTER: This is just a weird, clunky movie, it feels half-written because the premise doesn't really make much sense and it doesnt really wrap everything up that maybe needs to be wrapped up, so there's no way that the ending could possibly feel satisfying. When it starts it doesn't feel like there's a destination in mind, you'd think that would take the pressure off because it doesn't NEED to go to a specific place, but by the end it feels like picking a better destination probably would have been a good idea.
It should be simple, and for a lot of films, it is - set-up the situation, introduce a problem, plot twist in the late second act, the outlook is darkest before the dawn, but the quest still gets finished only not in a way you might expect. From the very start here, this story has problems - Jack McCall is a literary agent with the "gift of gab", he can talk quickly and manipulate people to bring about the results he wants. BUT he's also got trouble at home, his wife wants to move to a bigger house because she feels like she moved into her husband's bachelor pad, AND they have an infant son, and Jack wants nothing to do with changing diapers or taking care of the baby. These things are not connected very well, it's not like he's having marital problems because of his job, or he's an absent father because he's so busy, he's just fundamentally broken because he's not cut out to be a father, possibly because his own father ran off, as evidenced by his elderly mother in a nursing home, who has dementia and mistakes Jack for his father Raymond whenever he visits.
After an encounter with a spiritual guru who Jack wants to represent, in order to have success in the self-help section of the bookstore (I guess?) Jack finds that a magical tree has sprung up in his backyard, and he is somehow spiritually connected to the tree, whatever happens to the tree happens to him, and whenever he speaks, a number of leaves fall off the tree, the same number of words that he JUST spoke out loud - and when the leaves are all gone, it's assumed that Jack will die, only nobody can confirm this because it's never happened before in the history of trees. We can assume that the guru is somehow behind this, trying to teach Jack some kind of lesson, although it's a very oblique one. Was talking too much the exact problem? I'm not sure, it's more like Jack was just being a neglectful husband and father, and someone who placed too much emphasis on work and success, but it's a little hard to pin this down, and I fail to see how talking less is going to make him a better person, except in the most abstract sense.
Additional problems arise due to Jack's bonding with the tree - someone waters the tree and he appears soaked during a business meeting. Someone tries to poison the tree (who poisons a tree?) and Jack appears stoned during a business lunch. But the biggest problems of all, of course, arise because he can no longer communicate with people the way he's used to doing. (Writing words down on a note-pad isn't a good work-around, because those words also cause leaves to fall off the tree.). So Jack is reduced to using charades-like pantomiming to order coffee at Starbucks, and animal noises or messages from action figures for most other interactions.
And for some reason, he can't bring himself to say "I love you" to his wife when it really, really counts because that would be too many words? I can kind of see the screenwriter's point here, nobody knows how much time they have left to live, therefore we don't know how many interactions with each person we will have, how many opportunities to say the things we should say, so therefore we all should be motivated to make every word count, and take every opportunity to tell the people we love how we feel. But the way the film gets there is SO terribly clunky, it almost feels like there should have been a much easier way to make this point. But then, I don't really know what that would be, without being too obvious. So I guess we kind of end up where we need to be, but the dots just aren't connected that well, which makes me wonder if the trip going the long way to get there was worth all the effort.
Directed by Brian Robbins (director of "The Perfect Score")
Also starring Kerry Washington (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), Clark Duke (last seen in "The Last Movie Star"), Cliff Curtis (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), Allison Janney (last seen in "How to Deal"), Ruby Dee (last seen in "American Gangster"), Jack McBrayer (last seen in "Queenpins"), John Witherspoon (last seen in "Boomerang"), Kayla Blake (last seen in "Four Christmases"), Lennie Loftin (last seen in "Logan"), Alain Chabat (last seen in "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Ted Kennedy, Eshaya Draper (last seen in "Cadillac Records"), Emanuel Ragsdale, Jill Basey (last seen in "Horrible Bosses 2"), Greg Collins (last seen in "Cellular"), Lou Saliba, John Gatins (last seen in "Lying and Stealing"), Mitchell Fink, Edi Patterson (last seen in "The Starling"), Emily A. Burton, Tracy Mulholland (last seen in "Crazy, Stupid, Love"), Leonard Earl Howze (last seen in "True Memoirs of an International Assassin"), Winston J. Rocha, Bethany Dwyer, Sara Holden (last seen in "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F", Raquel Bell (ditto), David Burke, Jeff Kahn (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Matt Winston (last seen in "The Core"), Daniel Hepner, Eric Archibald, Philip Pavel (last seen in "Scream 2"), Phil Reeves (last seen in "13 Going on 30"), Kamala Jones, Kaius Harrison, Brian Gallivan (last seen in "The Informant!"), Steven M. Gagnon (last seen in "Rules of Engagement"), Katheryn Cain (last seen in "Blended"), Lauren Schuchman, Ted Kennedy, Jane Bartelme, Sarah Scott Davis, Skip Crank (last seen in "Faster"), Floyd Levine (last seen in "Coach Carter"), Bunny Levine (last seen in "La La Land"), Brian Norris, Kineret Bismut, Ariel Felix (last seen in "Plane"), Justina Machado (last seen in "The Purge: Anarchy"), Ariel Winter (also last seen in "The Last Movie Star")
RATING: 4 out of 10 breadsticks
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