Did anything?

In this Hollywood industry in-joke movie by Barry Levinson, Robert De Niro is Ben, a producer who day after day (as onscreen datelines inform us) just keeps having to face the same few "big" problems, rolling back in his face every morning in a bunch like Sisyphus' rock. The essence of the joke is that the rock is papier-mâché; it's all blown-up trifles. But the trouble with making this movie fly is they may not be either important enough or funny enough to engage the audience.

Ben's ex-wife Kelly (Robin Wright Penn), who now occupies the big house they used to share with their two little kids, doesn't want to get back together with him; why should she? Now at the bottom rung of the thirty "top" producers to be phogographed and featured in New York Magazine, eventually put far in the background at the photo shoot, these days he's been reduced to a foundering drone. He's had a string of flops. Now one of his directors, an eccentric Aussie with nail polish, spikey hair, and substance abuse issues called Jeremy Brunell (Michael Wincott), has just ended a new film in a singularly repulsive way involving Sean Penn, multiple bullet wounds, and a little white dog; and, being a classic dysfunctional prima donna, Mr. Brunell staunchly refuses to edit it, going into a psychological meltdown, despite a horrible test audience response and strenuous objections from the studio head, Lou Tarnow, impersonated by Catherine Keener. An upcoming film will star Bruce Willis, but Willis, hired because he is sexy, has grown a paunch and a "Grizzly Adams beard." Willis, as himself, not only refuses to shave off the beard, but throws a big tantrum when asked to do so. Ben hounds Willis' current agent, Dick Bell (John Turturro), to put the pressure on him. The movie will be cancelled if the beard doesn't come off. But Dick Bell is a prima donna too, a dandy dresser with a flashy nervous stomach and a tendency to collapse, screaming in pain, at the most inopportune moments. How can he dare to antagonize Bruce Willis, his most important client?

Should we laugh or cry? It's often hard to know, and some of the most climactic scenes are more than anything irritating unless you enjoy watching human train wrecks. The overriding emotion evoked is a bemused schadenfreude.

Somehow it seems the late Robert Altman already did this picture when he made The Player; and the ways that film's obviously different all seem like better choices. Altman succeeded enormously more by realizing that for the audience just spotting a lot of movie celebrities would be half the fun. This is how the public shares a Hollywood in-joke movie, peering in hungrily from outside--but Levinson misses out on a lot of that kind of innocent entertainment value by latching so tenaciously onto the tunnel-vision p.o.v. of insider Ben, and anyway What Just Happened? is more angst-ridden than laughter-filled, even if Ben's pain is muted. The movie is never really helped by its focus on the heavy, imploding De Niro. Obviously the man has great authority, but of late years he's too often thrown it away in a series of bad comedies unsuited to his original talents for intense roles tending toward the criminal--disspiriting productions like Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers, and he's out of place as a struggler who's trumped by the toughness of Keener, Willis' macho bluster, even Turturro's unconvincing tics. Everything he has going for himself, all his power, menace, and rage. is repressed in this movie. A lot of Hollywood people are from somewhere else, and just as De Niro has excelled in East Coast stuff about Italian Americans, Levin's best, truest, and incidentally funniest movies were set in his native Baltimore. Of course Levinson directed De Niro in a successful movie not set in either the Big Apple or Charm City--but the political satire Wag the Dog had some powerful points to make, whereas this effort's point is as muted as De Niro's line deliveries. If it's that producing movies is a risky game, we kind of knew that. If it was that De Niro and Levinson both seem past their prime lately, alas, we knew that too.

As recognition-celebrities other actors in the movie are not wasted, but interchangeable. It's almost incidental here whether it's Bruce Willis or somebody else, and all Sean Penn does is pose at Cannes (where he was anyway, working as head of the jury) and roll down a hill and die in the dysfunctional Aussie's bum movie. There are lots of subsidiary characters since everybody has a secretary or an assistant, if not dozens of them. Willils has a good suspenseful moment with the beard. Robin Wright Penn gets in some good licks. The Jewish funeral for a suicide of Ben's profession--more uneasy schadenfreude, this time for him--gives Willis another funny moment, mostly stolen from Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. But it's too tempting to reply to the question What's just happened? with Who cares?

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.