Saturday Night At The Movies
Staring at a blank page
By Dennis Hartley
High-strung: Emma Stone and Jeff Daniels in Paper Man
Did you ever encounter a married couple who left you pondering: “How in the hell did those two ever get together? Did somebody lose a bet?” I would lay odds that this thought has crossed the minds of husband and wife Kieran and Michele Mulroney, because in their first effort as co-writer/directors, Paper Man, they have created a fictional married couple who leave you pondering: “How in the hell did those two ever get together?”
“Those two” are Claire (Lisa Kudrow) and Richard (Jeff Daniels) Dunn. She is a successful and renowned vascular surgeon who works at a New York City hospital. He is a not-so-successful writer, whose last book went in the dumper. Needless to say, Claire is the breadwinner of the family; she’s the “responsible” one, and a bit of a control freak. Richard is a man-child; taciturn and socially awkward, with a tendency to daydream (typical writer). There is a third member of the family-but I’m jumping ahead of myself.
Richard is struggling with a new book, and Claire has decided that setting him up in a rented cottage in the Long Island boonies will help him focus on his work. As we watch the couple getting settled in to the digs, it becomes apparent that Claire is more of a caregiver/guardian to Richard than a wife; it is not unlike a doctor clinically observing a patient. Her fussy exasperation over her husband’s chronic underachievement is barely contained beneath her mask of cheerfulness as she prattles on about her busy professional schedule in the city for the upcoming week, and then casually asks Richard (with a hint of cautious optimism) what he has planned for his first week alone at the cottage. “I’ll start from the very beginning,” he says nebulously, adding with half-hearted jocularity “…which is a very good place to start.” Before she leaves for work the next morning, she asks him, with a palpable air of foreboding, “You didn’t bring ‘him’ with you, did you?”
So who is ‘him’? ‘He’ is Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds)- a figment of Richard’s imagination, his lifelong imaginary friend, ‘super-hero’, muse, conscience-whatever one chooses to call that “little voice” in our heads (what…you mean you don’t hear the voices?). Although he has assured his wife that ‘he’ is not along for this writing sabbatical, we are (naturally) introduced to him, the second after Claire pulls out of the driveway. “I sense danger,” he warns Richard. This “danger” comes in many forms. Richard tends to neurotically fixate on things (the couch in the cottage, for instance, really, really bothers him, to the point of obsession). Thinking too hard about his “half-dead marriage”, as the Captain refers to it (to Richard’s chagrin). And of course, staring listlessly at the empty page in his Smith-Corona for days on end (I do know that feeling).
The Captain’s early warning system really goes into overdrive when Richard ventures into town on a Spyder bike (don’t ask) and espies a young woman with the small town blues named Abby (Emma Stone) nonchalantly setting fire to a public trashcan. For some reason, this intrigues him. He follows her, and when she (rightfully) confronts this possibly mentally challenged middle-aged man stalking her on a Spyder bike, Richard blurts that he is new and town and needs a babysitter for Friday night. For some reason, this intrigues her, and she says yes. Imagine her surprise when she arrives for the job and Richard tells her that there is no baby to sit. He just wants to go out for a while, and would like her to hang out at his house In spite of the red flags, rather than turn and flee like a sensible person would at this juncture, she says OK. And, in accordance with the rules and regulations of indie film, this marks the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
So-is this film yet another quirky, navel-gazing indie dramedy, a la Lost in Translation/
Yes, and yeah, pretty much.
That being said, I still didn’t mind spending two hours with these characters, thanks to the sensitive direction and excellent performances, particularly by Daniels and Stone. Lisa Kudrow is always a wonderful actress to watch, and I was surprised by Kieran Culkin’s touching performance in a small but substantive supporting role. The Mulroneys were not quite sure how to end their film (it felt like they had several alternate endings but decided they didn’t want to throw any of them out of the final cut) but I’m willing to grade them on a curve since this is their first collaborative writing-directing effort (Kieran Mulroney is the younger brother of actor Dermot, if you care about such things). Perhaps they are staring at a blank page as we speak, cooking up their next project. I hope Captain Excellent is looking over their shoulder (and I wonder if he does contract work?).
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