‘Is This Thing On?’ Review: Bradley Cooper Finds His Limit in Divorce Dramedy
The sometimes amusing but mostly stingy divorce dramedy “Is This Thing On?,” which premiered at the New York Film Festival, confirms the limits of director Bradley Cooper’s myopic dramatic techniques. Cooper plays one half of a married couple, opposite Andra Day, who serve as obnoxious, pseudo-comic foils for the movie’s newly divorced couple, played by Will Arnett and Laura Dern. Arnett plays Alex, the main subject on-screen and an emotionally brittle finance guy who uses stand-up comedy to process his separation from his wife Tess (Dern), who’s sadly never as prominent or well-developed as Alex.
Off-screen, Cooper uses the same approach to direct his actors that he did previously in “A Star Is Born” and “Maestro”, including steering them, sometimes mechanically, from behind hand-held cameras that often seem too physically close to the actors to give viewers enough information about what we’re looking at. The characters’ overlapping dialogue also often drops us into conversations that are already underway, and then puts too much dramatic stress on coincidences and insinuating conversations that only hint at heavy emotions that we rarely see his protagonists processing.
So much of “Is This Thing On?” — which was written by Cooper, Arnett and Mark Chappell — concerns Alex’s destabilized emotional reality that it’s hard to appreciate the occasional sequence where Tess, a former star volleyball player, takes the spotlight and tries to get back into sports as a professional coach. Rather than compliment Alex’s mopey and often unyielding story, Tess’s subplot mostly provides Alex with questions that Cooper and his colleagues don’t seem interested in answering. Dern’s a typically strong presence despite her diminished role, but Tess mostly serves to remind Alex that he has no perspective following their mutual decision to split.
Viewers of “Is This Thing On?” will never be so lucky as to need reminding since Cooper’s fussy and stifling camera movements often stick close enough to the actors, especially Arnett, that their world often literally seems to revolve around them. That can be especially frustrating in scenes where Alex performs confessional standup routines at Manhattan’s famous Comedy Cellar, where one fellow comedian flatly tells Alex that he’s pretty bad at standup, but seems like such a nice guy anyway. That back-handed compliment lacks any sting given how uncomfortable Alex seems during hyper-clipped performance scenes. All we really know is that Alex finds a valuable creative outlet when he talks about his divorce at open mic nights, so it ostensibly doesn’t matter how the audience responds to him (some modest laughter, from a largely unseen crowd, accompanies most of his sets).
Viewers get some extra background information on Alex through fragmentary conversations with other side characters, including Alex’s cuttingly direct and generically wise-beyond-their-years 10 year old sons (Blake Kane and Calvin Knegton). Alex’s own parents, played by Christine Ebersole and Ciarán Hinds, also periodically drop in whenever the plot requires them to provide a knowing laugh about the difficulties of married life or hint at a romantic ideal that Alex struggles to achieve. Hinds’ character tellingly struggles to connect with his own son and then shows up later on in the film to stammer a platitudinous line that absolves Alex of responsibility by acknowledging his struggle to make sense of his messy life. There’s no such token acknowledgment for Ebersole’s character, who suggests that she’s more canny and forgiving than her partner in a couple of scenes.
Alex’s struggles are also only so enhanced by his interactions with his and Tess’s married friends Christine (Day) and Balls (Cooper), whom we eventually learn aren’t as secure in their relationship as they thought. The ostentatious ditziness of Cooper and Day’s characters—he’s a self-important but well-meaning actor, and she’s along for the ride—underscores the shallow nature of their consoling commentary.
They—or really, Balls—still teach Alex an important lesson about how to appreciate his post-breakup relationship with Tess. Then again, in a representative scene, Christine talks at Alex about her frustrations with her own marriage while he mostly sits there and witnesses her one-sided tirade. It’s an ostensibly comic scene, but it’s also not paced, blocked or scripted in a way that makes Day’s self-absorbed character seem funny on any level beyond the conceptual.
Cooper puts an unfair emphasis on Arnett’s glassy performance, but never really challenges him to do more than act wounded and stunned throughout. Arnett’s already proven to be good at playing this sort of self-deluded sad sack in projects ranging from “Arrested Development” to “Bojack Horseman,” but Cooper’s habit of reducing Alex’s emotional reality to so many visually unyielding camera set-ups and emotionally clipped dialogue makes “Is This Thing On?” feel more like a polished dress rehearsal than a fully realized drama.
In this light, Alex’s exchanges with Balls come across as not only the most credible, but also the most amusing scenes in the movie. Their exchanges aren’t especially insightful or memorably staged, but it is still amusing to see how much time and energy these two neurotic dopes waste on trying to protect each other from harsh truths about their respective marriages. Arnett and Cooper’s bro-y camaraderie requires no additional context. The rest of “Is This Thing On?” appears sketchy to the point of constant distraction.
“Is This Thing On?” opens in theaters on Dec. 19.
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