From Bard to Worse

Steve Coogan suffers the slings and arrows of being a dopey Shakespeare hopeful.

by Shaun Brady

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Published: Aug 20, 2008

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cathy kanavy SHAKES A LEG: Coogan attempts to find his groove in the high school drama department. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Those who can, do, the old saw goes, and those who can't, teach. And said teachers instruct with an inevitable undercurrent of bitterness that they've been reduced to training others to surpass their own (lack of) success.

Steve Coogan's Dana Marschz has long since given up on his dream of acting, taking the occasional commercial or infomercial but mostly teaching drama at a Tucson high school. Unfortunately, he's failing at this second career, as well, his latest presentation — an adaptation of Erin Brockovich — viciously panned by a barely teenaged drama critic and the theater program as a whole slated for the ax following the current school year. Faced with teaching a fuller-than-usual class due to asbestos levels in the school canceling all other electives, Marschz decides to save drama with a new piece of his own — albeit one that sequelizes one of the best-known works in English literature.

Incompetents are always easy pickings for comedy, incompetent artistes a particularly tempting target — Christopher Guest has built a directorial career on lampooning the pretensions of less-than-talented showbiz aspirants. But mocking the ego-over-skill types comes with a built-in tightrope walk, teetering between parody and condescension.

That battle rages throughout Hamlet 2, an uneven spoof from director Andrew Fleming, taking a 90-degree turn from Nancy Drew to veer closer toward his erratic political goof Dick. Here, Fleming chucks his every idea at the screen, content that enough will stick even if the result is complete tonal incoherence.

Fleming co-wrote the screenplay with Pam Brady, a longtime South Park vet with credits on Bigger, Longer and Uncut and Team America: World Police. She aims for a South Park irreverence, but without Matt Stone and Trey Parker's stomach for libertarian satirical bludgeoning, the result falls short, aiming at too-easy targets and skewering icons without purpose.

Coogan spends the film in a tug-of-war with the script; he's forced into some blatantly obvious humor, from the broad commercial parodies to the endless mangling of his character's consonant-heavy name. But he also maximizes the thinly veiled rage burbling under Marschz's veneer of undying optimism. On paper, that frustrated anger is merely an excuse for periodic outbursts and hints of an abusive past that surfaces most memorably in the final production's musical number, "Raped in the Face."

But Coogan plays Marschz as drowning in his own passive-aggressiveness. When hit with each successive piece of bad news, from being fired to being deserted by his wife, he disappears within himself, a sense of panic hiding between his eyes while he mouths inspirational platitudes — many while choking back bilious disappointment.

Coogan manages to create a fleshed-out character from a batch of eccentricities and one-liners, but even better is Catherine Keener as Marschz's fed-up wife, Brie, whose berating of her failure of a husband becomes forgivable and almost understandable in her hands. Keener can be at once brutally hectoring and tender, creating a past relationship that foregoes having to explain why she's with this caricature in the first place. She's given too little to do, but elevates the film whenever she's onscreen.

Also in the cast is Elisabeth Shue as "Elisabeth Shue," a version of herself so tired of the Hollywood game that she's become a nurse. The rest of the cast largely plays things straight, except for a typically shrill Amy Poehler as an ACLU lawyer. If anything, Fleming relies too much on Coogan carrying the film, lazily camping on his lead's reactions when his material is too weak on its own.

That weakness includes the would-be extravaganza of offensiveness, Hamlet 2 itself. Tossing in Jesus, Einstein, Hillary Clinton and a gay men's chorus along with overblown production values, the play-within-a-movie offers a few silly chuckles where riotous laughter is called for, and gently trots out fish-in-a-barrel targets without actually daring to trample too many sensibilities. Like the film as a whole, it's a hit-or-miss affair that's too often funnier to describe than it is to watch.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Hamlet 2

Directed by Andrew Fleming

A Focus Features release

 

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