Delayed Reaction: The Extra Man

[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]

Connection to As You Like It: Both star Kevin Kline

 

Premise: A young man moves to New York City after losing his job and rents a room with an odd, failed playwright.

 

I’m on the home stretch of my “Century in a Month” project at this point. By 2010 and beyond, I’ve seen a lot of the movies I want to see. The options start to get thin. I’ll take anything that gets me closer to the end, and I’m likely to find out why I never sought the films out before.

 

I hated The Extra Man, and in hindsight, that should not have been much of a surprise. It’s adapted from a Jonathan Ames book. I don’t know a lot about Ames. I know that I checked out immediately from his HBO show, Bored to Death, because the humor didn’t work for me. I recall reading some columns of his in Playboy*. He felt pretentious in those. The Extra Man carries over the exact tone that bothered me from my other exposure to Ames’ work.

 

*I had a subscription for several years as some sort of statement that I actually read the articles. I’ll add this to the list of reasons why I must’ve been insufferable in college.

 

This leans into all of Paul Dano’s worst “sad boy” instincts. The story about him being an aspiring crossdresser didn’t sit well with me. It felt like it was written by a non-crossdresser trying to imagine what a crossdresser’s motivation was. It reminded me a bit of in high school when a straight kid would ask a gay kid if he ever looked as his own penis and got aroused” * He clearly just isn’t getting it. Kevin Kline is instructed to go buck wild throughout the film. It’s reminiscent to a poorly-written Frasier Crane. Making a high-minded or obscure reference is only funny if it is crafted around a joke. In Frasier, people aren’t laughing because they get his opera reference. They laugh because it’s delivered like a joke and the punchline is that he sounds full of himself. As a result, Kline is just insufferable from beginning to end. He’s making smart comments whimsically, not comedically. This is a 1h48m movie and I was checking how much time was left 30 minutes in.

 

*I’m not trying to absolve myself there. I made many comments to gay friends that I thought passed as wit at the time.

 

I’ll be generous and suggest that there’s a very specific audience this movie will work for. I was not that audience. It very much had the feeling that I was someone’s ‘plus one’ at a medical convention where the keynote speaker kept cracking med school jokes.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don’t Recommend