Formula: Being There * Bowfinger
It takes a lot for me to come out of a movie praising Being There as doing something the right way. I really hated Being There. I think it's toothless social commentary that pats itself on the back for being prescient, when it's actually making the same point every generation makes about society. Fool's Paradise is very much Being There except that it specifically targets Hollywood.
It is the feature directorial debut of Charlie Day. Day plays a mute man who is incapable of forming his own thoughts. After he's thrown on the street due to no health insurance, he's hired onto a movie as leverage against a movie star he looks identical to. He ends up replacing that star, getting the name Latte Pronto, and going through all the stages of stardom. I mean all of them. Rise to fame. Fall from grace. Whirlwind romance. Swift divorce. Franchise films. Good press. Bad press. Getting a big-time agent. Getting passed off to a junior agent. Friendships and fallouts with big stars. Every stereotypical Hollywood beat you can think of happens to him. And quickly. The only constant is Lenny (Ken Jeong), a struggling publicist who latches onto Latte early on for a quick buck but does seem to be the one person actually looking out for him.
There's a decent amount of this that sounds pretty funny. On paper, Kate Beckinsale and Adrien Brody as different flavors of method, vapid Hollywood stars sounds pretty funny. Day has a lot of friends willing to check in for quick scenes and stupid gags. Day himself is pretty good at wordless acting. He's honed his foolishness for years.
The problem is that a movie moves from one unfunny, unclever beat to the next for 98 minutes before just ending. The strangest thing is that the movie doesn't know what era of Hollywood it's skewering. The production design often evokes an older Hollywood of the 50s or 60s. The soundstages and films he's in certainly look more like the movies churned out back then. But it definitely is set in the modern day. So what is it making fun of? I'm not even convinced that Charlie Day believes the commentary he's making about Hollywood. I came away from this baffled by the decision to make this at all. As much as I dislike a movie like Being There, I at least know what point it was trying to make. I understand what humor it was going for. It did understand the society it was satirizing. Fool's Paradise literally feels like the same kind of poorly considered, overly-noted, uninspired movie that Latte Pronto would star in. And not in the meta, self-satirizing way.
Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend
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