a SIFF 2009 review
Disappointing Answer Man Offers Up Bad Advice
First-time writer-director John Hindman’s The Answer Man is a movie I wished I liked more than I actually do. One of the more surprising disappointments to screen at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, the movie is a hodgepodge of eccentric romantic comedy clichés and a relatively intriguing character-driven innovation that never quite catches fire despite an excellent cast throwing their all into making it work. Thanks to a stupendously inept finale it ends up going nowhere, and by the time it fades to black the only question I had was what could potentially been changed to salvage it.
Lauren Graham and Jeff Daniels in Magnolia Pictures' The Answer Man
The story follows Arlen Faber (Jeff Daniels), a reclusive self-help author whose one publication twenty years ago changed the face of the entire industry. But where everyone who read it thought their easygoing hero had a mainline connection to God himself, the reality was anything but, the writer a needy, selfish semi-depressive narcissist wanting to be left alone.
A couple of chance meetings has the potential to fix that, however, both of them at least starting to open his eyes to the possibilities there’s more to life than some off-the-cuff advice jotted down at the height of tragedy. One of these newfound sort-of friendships might even have the chance of blossoming into romance, his feelings for kindhearted chiropractor and single mother Elizabeth (Lauren Graham) even more expansive than he probably realizes.
Here’s what I liked about The Answer Man. Daniels, always an underrated actor, throws himself completely into the part of Faber, making his constantly shifting character traits feel genuine and true. I also was quite captivated with his relationship with Elizabeth’s son Alex (Max Antisell), the moments featuring the two of them bonding having an emotional vitality the rest the film lacks. There are also some pretty decent Q&A quick hits between the author and a struggling bookstore owner (nicely underplayed by Lou Taylor Pucci), but there aren’t quite enough of them for their bond to ring true.
All of this would be well and good if the rest would have been at least moderately passable or if it had come to something close to a satisfying conclusion. I got the feeling while watching it Hindman was intent on making things quirky just for the sake of making them quirky, the filmmaker adding a bunch of idiotic idiosyncrasies that served no purpose other than to point out just how threadbare his screenplay actually is.
Personally, I’m not entirely sure what the fatal flaw is. The central romance between Arlen and Elizabeth does not generate heat or emotion, never flowers into something I could believe would melt the writer’s icy veneer and open him up to a world he long ago abandoned. For whatever reason Daniels and Graham never quite click, and for all their efforts the chemistry existing between the two of them stalls out at right about zero.
But what about that finale? The last sequence of events in the picture is about as inert and as maddeningly dead as any I’ve seen in ages. Nothing that transpires is interesting, the lessons learned and imparted half-hearted and annoying. There was no sense of enlightenment and nothing resembling closure, and by the time the central characters stared one another down for the final smile I could have cared less if love was still there are not.
I feel like I’m being harsh. I rage so much against romantic comedies that revel in mediocrity to the point I sound like a broken record, so when one like Hindman’s comes along it pains me to slam it. But just because the filmmaker admirably tries to be different and isn’t so beholden to tired conventions doesn’t mean I have pat him on the back for making something that doesn’t entirely suck. Bad is still bad, and even going outside the box isn’t enough to mask the fact that going to see The Answer Man is poor advice not even the most amenable should take.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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