Delayed Reaction: The Player

Premise: A Hollywood executive kills a writer and tries to get away with it.

 

My feelings are all over the place on this movie. Before seeing it, the movie was most notable to me for the factoid that it is the movie with by far the most Oscar winners in it (A staggering 13!). That may not sound like that many, but go ahead and try coming up with a movie that even has 5 Oscar winners on screen. After you come up with Avengers: Endgame (7 winners), you'll run out. Granted, The Player has had nearly 30 years to inflate that number. It's nevertheless impressive.

 

I'm a sucker for movies about making movies. No one without that weakness could love Bowfinger as much as I do. This movie is topically extremely similar to Hail, Caesar! which keeps rising in my Coen Brothers rankings. Where The Player starts to lose me is in the cynicism. It really doubles-down on the heartless business side of things. It's all about a bunch of creatively bankrupt people who make all the movies. Every movie pitch is the same "It's blank meets blank" formula. The movie that gets made by the end loses all the artistic merit it started with. The studio's slogan - Movies. Now more than ever - is circular and meaningless. I'm all for some Hollywood commentary. I know a lot of it in this is true and probably makes studio execs cringe due to how on the mark it is. The Player is missing that last little thing though: love. I know that's corny, but it's pretty key. Bowfinger means nothing without Steve Martin and company in awe at the premiere of the movie. Hail, Caesar! works because it pivots to scenes of actual filmmaking that are magical - the synchronized swimming scene, the Channing Tatum dance scene, George Clooney's monologue. The Player doesn't have much of that. It's the kind of movie you watch and assume Robert Altman never made another studio movie again or took a long break from making movies*. It’s all that’s wrong with Hollywood without the reminder why people still want to make movies despite it.

 

*Instead, he made Short Cuts a year later for a subsidiary of New Line Cinemas.

 

The movie is also too self-congratulatory for my taste. For example, the opening tracking shot is impressive. It has that busy-ness and overlapping dialogue that Altman did better than anyone, yet it also makes repeated mentions of how great opening tracking shots like the one in Heart of Darkness are. Everything in that movies is a wink to the camera, and that got old really fast. The ending, revealing that the movie was the script that was getting pitched to Tim Robbins in the movie itself, felt like Robert Altman calling attention to how clever he was being.

 

This movie is enjoyable enough though. It's got an absolutely stacked cast who all seem to be having fun sitting on the other side of the desk for a change. It's a clever movie (even if it lets you know it too often) and has some gags that will be funnier to think back on than they were in the moment.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend