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Friday
Jul302010

Movie Review - 'The Extra Man'

DateFriday, July 30, 2010 at 11:10PM
The Extra Man

Starring Kevin Kline, Paul Dano, and Katie Holmes
Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini
Rated R

extramanposter.jpg If a film is supposed to be about a mixed bag of characters, how can it be evaluated if a mixed bag is exactly what the movie is? Is it a victory because such a story people with these characters couldn't be very smooth anyway, or is it still just a middle-of-the road motion picture?

The Extra Man succeeds in introducing a lot of interesting elements, but fails to put them all together in a meaningful way or for any satisfying reason. At the very least, The Extra Man gives Kevin Kline his best role in years.

Kline plays Henry Harrison, who purports to be an instructor at Queens College in New York, but in his spare time, he's an extra man. Put succinctly, old widows have nobody to accompany them to restaurants and the opera, so they call Henry Harrison. "H. Harrison" is his signature reply when the phone rings.

He's not technically a male escort, because nothing sexual ever happens, but for years, Harrison has served as one of New York's premier chaperons. Doesn't look like it pays anything, though. He has to rent a spare room in his squalid apartment to make extra money, drives a barely operational 30-year-old Buick, and when his socks are too threadbare to be seen in public, Henry just applies shoe polish to his legs.

His boarder is the equally maladjusted Louis Ives (Paul Dano), recently fired from his job at a prep school for trying on a student's bra over his clothes. It seems innocent at first - well, more innocent than it is, anyway - but when he arrives in New York City and takes up residence in the apartment of H. Harrison, Louis begins to explore transvestism.

Unfortunately, the way it's used in The Extra Man, that act of self-discovery is used to set up a climactic moment and doesn't serve to answer any real questions about the character outside of that. It's intermittent and ultimately unimportant. But it does give Louis a dimension, something he'd totally lack otherwise.

Ambling for some kind of direction, Louis sees something rewarding in Henry's way of life, so the old dandy takes the padawan under his wing with decidedly mixed results. There's that word again - "mixed."

Outside of Kline, there's not much that really works at all. Dano, who is never a force, is a good call for Louis Ives, but the character lacks a lot of development. He'd like to get closer to a pretty co- worker (Katie Holmes, a bad choice for the earthy vegan type), but that wouldn't be believable at all. She's assured and pretty and he lives on a twin bed in the apartment of a broke 60-year-old chaperone reading F. Scott Fitzgerald and Henry James all night.

John C. Reilly wears a gigantic beard and curly wig and saddles himself with a ridiculous high-pitched voice. It doesn't work; we still recognize him. But it is a wonder why an actor as great as Reilly would do such a silly role, especially since it's so unimportant to the movie.

It's a shame there's so little around Kline that even has a challenge to live up to, and he's treated as a side character in Louis' story, but since Louis doesn't know how he wants to end his own story, that's not really the way Jonathan Ames' novel should have been adapted here.

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Reader Comments (1)

This was absolutely the worst movie anybody bothered to make this year, and we wasted $7.98 to see it on Pay on Demand. Why would Kline or O'Reilly ever have been so desperate for work that they would have taken a job here. Geez, what a horrible film.

Thursday, August 5, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterPhyllis Zeno

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