FFWD Weekly
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| FILM The Impostors The Impostors is a film which crawls on its knees and begs to be called words like "zany" and "loopy" and "madcap," words which haven't had a production to attach themselves to since I Love Lucy. Oh yes, lest we forget, there are "shenanigans." Life would be nothing without shenanigans. Comedy has come a long way since the '30s, often losing its way down side roads the likes of Dumb and Dumber and BASEketball. Actor/director, Stanley Tucci (Big Night) wants to take it home again. And he's the sort of man - a man with that hint o' pomposity - to try and change the course of comedy. The Impostors is about Arthur (Tucci) and Maurice (Oliver Platt), two down-and-out Depression-era actors who want nothing more than to act. Given tickets to see a performance of Hamlet, with a highly successful but utterly obnoxious star, Jeremy Burton (Alfred Molina) in the lead role, they voice their opinions of the performance loudly in a bar afterwards. Overhearing the critique, Burton starts a brawl which ends with Arthur and Maurice hiding in a crate that winds up on the deck of a cruise ship heading for Europe. As stowaways, the men encounter an irrepressible head stewardess (Lili Taylor), a sadistic suitor (Campbell Scott), a plotting revolutionary (Tony Shalhoub), deposed royalty (Isabella Rossellini), and a suicidal singer (Steve Buscemi). There is a lot of running down hallways, hiding under beds, in closets, and ducking into wrong rooms. (Do we hear the word "madcap" yet?) The film is set in the heart of the 1930s, a time which Stanley Tucci says he would have been happier being born in. He is sitting next to me at the Toronto Film Festival talking in one of those soft voices designed to force people to listen carefully. The old comedies of the 1930s intrigue him because of their stage-like quality and scripting with lines which have to be delivered with extreme dramatic flair. Hamming it up might be one way of looking at it; comedy for the sake of a laugh instead of delivering some beefed-up satiric message. "I like the formality of those times and the design of those times where everything wasn't mass produced," Tucci says. "Things moved then at a simpler pace and television wasn't our god." It's a caper film and the reason we haven't seen many of them lately is obvious to Tucci. "Nobody will make them, but I love them. The Marx Brothers movies and Buster Keaton, they're funny and they are very pure. I like that they are elegant in their simplicity. They are populated by stock characters which are much more real to me." Ever since the 1960s and comedian Lenny Bruce, comedy has been obligated to have some kind of latent message, so when the issue of significance within the plot was raised, of which there is essentially none, Tucci agreed and then did a reflexive. "Well, I hope it has some depth and resonance but we really just wanted to have a good time. It's not very heavy," he admits. Then he begins to drift to the inevitable message. "The theme is about identity and there is a speech in it about 'one single face,' which is where America is heading. I mean, we are losing our individuality. There is a sameness that is really scary to me. I had an apartment on the Upper West Side for a very long time and I've seen (the area) become increasingly homogenized." Tucci, warming to the hidden truth, expounds on the Big Picture, the future of the melting pot mentality, a social theory which began with integrity. "You used to be able to see in the melting pot all the different cultures and all the beautiful differences. Now we are getting to the point where Times Square is a parody, like the Times Square Theme Park." Try as he might, The Impostors is still just a light comedy. And there really is nothing wrong with that. |