Perhaps it's just that several years of, shall we say, spotty work from Barry Levinson and Robert DeNiro have lowered my expectations, but I was pleasantly surprised by the genuine sharpness of What Just Happened?, their latest collaboration (the director and actor worked together in '96 on the tepid Sleepers and in '97 on the much bruited Wag the Dog; Levinson was also an executive producer on 2002's Analyze That).
The movie's a peculiar animal; its script is by producer Art Linson, who's adapting his own book—his second volume of memoirs of Hollywood madness. The book's non-fiction, and actually includes stories of DeNiro...although one of the most uproarious bits concerns Alec Baldwin's insistence on growing a beard for the Mamet-scripted, Linson-produced The Edge. Stay with me now. What Just Happened?, the movie, is a fictionalization of Linson's book, with DeNiro playing a Linson stand-in named Ben. The Baldwin-beard-business is transposed to Bruce Willis, who's playing himself—or rather, an unbelievably aggressive and assholeish version of himself (although in the end credits his role is as "Actor"). I usually can't stand this kind of inside-baseball moviemaking, wherein showbiz figures prove what good sports they are by essaying appalling versions of themselves...
But these guys—not to mention Sean Penn (another self-player), Catherine Keener (in a very low-key variant of the talent-disembowelling studio exec), John Turturro (as a repellent wreck of an agent) and the too-rarely-seen Michael Wincott (as a dissolute "visionary" director) made me like it. DeNiro gives one of his drollest performances in a long time, speculating on the box-office chances of the humungous bummer of a film he's just previewed by shrugging to an exec, "This could be the year for grief." Linson's dialogue is sufficiently sulphuric that you know he's learned a lot from his man collaborations with Mamet...but maybe learned more from the reality of his life. Levinson, DeNiro and Linson were all present for the opening screening, and all three seemed genuinely beffudled when an audience member during the Q&A referred to the film as a satire. "We never thought of it as satirical, we wanted to make this a reflection of what the filmmaking process is actually like," Levinson said. Levinson hypes up that reality with a bunch of fast-forwarding, fast-cutting interludes of Ben travelling the Hollywood freeways from one crisis to the next—what these old-school directors won't get up to once you've given them a bunch of digital toys!—and uses the music score/song soundtrack as a commentary in a defter way than he has in a while. (I was particularly pleased by the use of Nick Drake's dry, faux-self-pity song "Poor Boy.")
But for all the humiliation, both professional and personal, that DeNiro's incarnation of Linson goes through, What Just Happened? feels kind of self-involved, in a way that, say, Beware of A Holy Whore does not. Okay, that's a completely inapt comparison and I hope you enjoyed the intentional humor of it...but...I suppose that to complain about self-involvement with a film such as this, utilizing talent such as this, would be to fall into the intentional fallacy trap. What Just Happened? isn't perfect, but it doesn't trifle.
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