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 Writer/director/actor Stanley Tucci has, in the three films he’s directed, shown a remarkable affinity for period pieces. His recently released theatrical feature Joe Gould’s Secret is set in pre-Beat Generation New York bohemia in the 1940s, while Tucci’s is first directing effort, Big Night, evoked the Jersey Shore in the 1950s, where two very different brothers are trying to make a go of their small Italian restaurant. And sandwiched in between was The Impostors, a raucous period comedy about two down and out actors, in which a couple of masters of the craft, Tucci and his longtime friend Oliver Platt, tweak their profession lovingly, showing that, behind every actor’s vanity, there’s still more vanity, and yet more.
Tucci’s tale takes place sometime in the semi-distant past when the rich travelled on ocean liners, men wore hats and peculiar underwear ensembles, and ingenues were darned spunky. Short and balding, Tucci plays Arthur, whose sidekick Maurice (Platt, who brilliantly portrayed a failed comic in Peter Chelsom’s 1994 Funny Bones), is his physical opposite, but his professional mirror image. Namely, these two actors can’t catch a break on Broadway. They’re the kind of sad sacks who, when they finally nail down roles, lose the parts one minute later when the playwright’s wife leaves him and pulls out the money that provided the backing. (In an unbilled part, the playwright is none other than Woody Allen.) Pushed to their limit and desperately hungry, Arthur and Maurice try a complicated ruse to con a bakery operator into giving them some cream puffs, only to wind up with two tickets to a performance of Hamlet starring an overcured ham named Jeremy Burtom (Alfred Molina). Drinking in a bar after the performance, Maurice loudly denounces Burtom’s performance and professionalism, the actor walks in, a fracas ensues, and after a chase, the two performers find themselves stowaways on an ocean liner. Yup, Stan and Ollie--rather, Arthur and Maurice--have stumbled into the same territory the Marx Brothers worked so fruitfully in A Night at the Opera. And here Tucci’s imagination goes utterly over the top, as he peoples the passenger list with a tennis champion with a taste for nude wrestling (Scots comic and actor Billy Connolly); a suicidal singer named Happy Franks (Steve Buscemi); a first mate with radical political motives (Tony Shaloub, who worked opposite Tucci in Big Night); a stewardess who’s sweet and helpful (Lili Taylor); and many, many other zanies, not the least of whom is Meistrich, the head steward who is a Prussian dictator all the way down to his duelling scar (Campbell Scott, yet another Big Night alumnus). As luck would have it, who else has booked passage but the odious Jeremy Burtom, who has vowed revenge on Arthur and Maurice. Tucci makes the entire thing hang together with highly assured direction, plus an utter willingness to play with the reality of film. (When Maurice, hiding under a bed, overhears the first mate making dastardly plans in a weird Central European language, he knows what he’s saying because, hey, there are the subtitles, right under his nose.) Best of all, as a screenwriter, Tucci can drop memorable lines one after another--lines so sophisticated in their structure that they sort of detonate in the brain, exploding laughter from the mouth. The scene between Arthur, Maurice and Connolly’s tennis champion Sparks is a prime example. Finding the tall, dark and hangdog Maurice attractive, Sparks boldly proclaims, “I once wrestled a man on the steps of the Acropolis when the sun was at its peak, wearing only what God Almighty sent me into the world with. Can you picture that?” Yes, this may be a screwball comedy of mistaken identities, slamming doors and narrow escapes, but it’s a screwball comedy tinged with the soul of Noel Coward But it was only a day or so after seeing The Impostors in the theater back in 1998 that the major revelation hit me. With the exception of Isabella Rosellini, who plays a deposed European queen (and spends most of her few minutes of screen time hiding behind a veil), nobody in the film looks like a movie star. Tucci and Platt sure don’t. Ditto for Lili Taylor and Steve Buscemi, which is why all their early work was in low budget independent films. Even Hope Davis, playing a young woman who wallows in depressing poetry, is fairly plain when stripped of the makeup that gives her an offbeat beauty in Tucci’s current film, Joe Gould’s Secret. No, Stanley Tucci somehow got the money to make a movie that stars actors who all look like real people. And that may be his greatest achievement of all. J. H. Purdy |
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