The sight gags (like David Cross’s giant glasses) don’t always work, but mockumentary The Grand hits more than it misses
Improvised movie comedies have a long, storied and notoriously inconsistent history. For every This is Spinal Tap, there are a dozen low- or no-budget films that attempt to bottle lightning but come up empty. Improvisation has certainly helped its fair share of recent flicks — Judd Apatow’s comedic assembly line comes to mind — but his films usually have a well-scripted safety net. The Grand, director Zack Penn’s poker parody, takes a far bigger risk.
Not that Penn hasn’t hedged his bets. Scan the credits, and you’ll see an impressive amount of comic talent. Woody Harrelson, David Cross, Chris Parnell, even famed German director Werner Herzog and Welcome Back Kotter’s Gabe Kaplan turn up. Herzog’s deadpan turn as “The German,” a poker player who draws his strength from killing small animals, is particularly inspired.
The talented cast is given a pretty sparse framework to build a film on. The bare-bones story revolves around “The Grand,” a winner-take-all $10 million poker tournament. Harrelson’s gambler is the most sympathetic of the lot — he’s hoping to win so he can save his deceased grandfather’s casino from destruction — but like watching poker of the ESPN variety, there are no clear-cut heroes and villains. Parnell plays a socially awkward, Asperger’s-afflicted savant; Cross and Curb Your Enthusiasm vet Cheryl Hines are a sibling duo competing for the affection of father Kaplan; Richard Kind is the naive online-only gambler who lucked his way into a spot in the tourney — it’s far from being toothy satire, but there’s plenty of room for solid riffing and the cast generally takes advantage.
The Grand takes the improvisation one step further than most mockumentaries, though, by basing the outcome of the movie on a real poker game between the leads. On the plus side, this makes the climactic match surprisingly intense — the actors are genuinely playing to win, which forces them to slip completely into their characters. It’s a technique that makes a lot of sense, and Penn should be commended for having the guts to go all in.
The drawback, though, is that without knowing how his movie would end, Penn had to structure the film as loosely as he could. Since the story couldn’t pivot on the outcome of the tournament, it’s also pretty much impossible to make a coherent, satisfying plot. Instead, Penn relies heavily on tangents and asides, like Ray Romano as Hines’s fantasy football-addicted husband, or Jason Alexander’s brief appearance as the vaguely ethnic Yakov Achmed.
The risk doesn’t quite pay off, then, but it’s certainly not a bust. The Grand’s assemblage of comic heavyweights guarantees at least a few knockout scenes, and Penn and co-writer (er… co-outliner?) Matt Bierman know enough about poker to make the tournament itself surprisingly compelling. It’s no royal flush, but it gets the job done.
