Film Review: Hollywood made a big flop; that's what happened
In "What Just Happened," an airless, humorless, "insider's" satire of Hollywood, Robert De Niro plays a veteran movie producer named Ben who is trying to cope with his divorce from his wife and with Bruce Willis' refusal to shave his Grizzly Adams beard for his new action-hero role.
It's a measure of the movie's surprising miscalculation that director Barry Levinson and writer Art Linson devote as much time to the producer's familiar and tedious domestic woes as to his hair war with Willis, which at least presents a novel plot device. No doubt Willis was congratulated by his pals for being a good sport and portraying himself as a loathsome egomaniacal tyrant; the Park City premiere in January probably echoed with appreciative, knowing chuckles. The auditorium at the Malco Ridgeway Four, where the movie opens today, however, is probably just going to echo.
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Magnolia Pictures
A career burial? Bruce Willis (from left), Robert De Niro, John Turturro and Stanley Tucci fail to bring life to the Hollywood satire "What Just Happened."
Rated R for language, some violent images, sexual content and some drug material
Length: 107 minutes
Released: October 17, 2008 LimitedScore: 3.5
Cast: Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, Catherine Keener, John Turturro, Robin Wright Penn
Director: Barry LevinsonProducer: Robert De Niro, Art Linson, Jane Rosenthal
Writer: Art Linson
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Distributor: Magnolia Pictures
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Like Willis, Sean Penn plays himself in "What Just Happened." However, Penn's real-life wife, Robin Wright Penn, plays Ben's ex-wife. Meanwhile, Catherine Keener plays a no-nonsense studio chief, and John Turturro is Willis' frightened agent ("The man's an animal," he says of his client).
Levinson ("Wag the Dog") and veteran producer Linson (working from his memoir, "What Just Happened: Bitter Tales from the Hollywood Front Line") certainly attracted a lot of talent to this project, and they certainly know their turf. But what could be more pointless than a bad movie about the compromises, back stabbing and ego clashes that create bad movies in Hollywood?
Among other lessons, "What Just Happened" demonstrates that handheld camerawork -- a faux-documentary style that conveys anxiety and dread -- is not funny. The movie also shows that De Niro is no longer an automatically intriguing screen presence; we're never sure why we're supposed to be interested in the dull narrator/character he plays here.
From what we see, Ben is making bad movies, whether his action hero is clean shaven or not, or whether test audiences approve of his films or not. (One subplot involves Ben's efforts to convince an arty British director to remove an audience-alienating dog-killing scene from his new movie.) Says Willis to Ben: "You're just a producer. ... The mayonnaise in a bad sandwich."
At the end of "Sunset Boulevard" -- a great Hollywood-produced satire of Hollywood (the recent "Tropic Thunder," believe it or not, is another) -- the narrator, Joe Gillis, finds himself dead in a swimming pool. At the end of "What Just Happened," the narrator finds himself taking part in a Vanity Fair photo shoot as one of the 30 most powerful producers in Hollywood. But he's humiliated, because he's been relegated to the margin of the photo. Gillis probably wouldn't sympathize, and neither did I.
-- John Beifuss, 529-2394
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