D. Peter Bogdanovitch
Colour
I’d like to think that Robert De Niro saw the irony in
making this little seen film. I’d like to think that he approached it with a
degree of self-awareness about what he was doing, an understanding of what he
was taking on. I hope he didn’t arrive on the first day treating it in exactly
the same bored and disinterested way he no doubt treated the other fourteen
films he was appearing in that year. As even though the name of the character
is wrong, even though the profession is wrong, this film is almost ridiculously
autobiographical for Bobby De Niro. It’s a movie which is reaching into the
soul of its star and trying to display it to the world. And I just hope that Bobby
figured that out, that the irony of playing this character with these problems
wasn’t lost on him in his usual of haze of disinterestedly going through the
motions.
Bobby is Toby Rushkin, a one-time brilliant and fêted young
novelist who has hit hard times and now churns out scripts for what looks like
an incredibly tacky and unfunny sitcom. (Basically it looks like a less
funny, less classy, more sexist version of ‘Two and a Half Men’. It’s therefore
ridiculously easy to see why the character feels such contempt for the source
of his paycheques.) Bobby spends the whole film striving to get back to where
he thinks he belongs, reminding himself and others around him of how big a deal
he once was. This doesn’t have the effect of building him up in the way he
hopes, though it just shows how far and horribly he has fallen. The title comes
from the sentence he uses to justify himself; wheels out when he tumbles into
the pits into self-pity; even wields as a boast as he introduces himself to new
people. We follow him as he tries repeatedly to pull himself up before falling
back again; whilst the whole time having to deal with his boss Andy Garcia and
his on/off girlfriend Jennifer Tilly. (Yes, De Niro, Garcia and Tilly really do
make a cast list which would have been a whole lot more exciting ten years
earlier.) It’s a maudlin comedy, one about failure and the fear of failure and
the trap of failure.
And of course it all applies to Bobby. Here is a man who
used to do absolutely incredible, awe inspiring work, but who is now trapped in
a seemingly endless cycle of soulless hackery. This is a story about Bobby’s
own predicament, about what’s happened to him and his career. But the thing is,
from his low energy and bored look in his eye, it’s not at all convincing that
Bobby has figured this out. It seems almost as if this is just another job for
Bobby, another paycheque, one which will be over in a couple of weeks and then he’ll
head onto his next film. You watch it and want him to realise that he’s making
autobiography, you want him to rise to the challenge, but it never comes off.
Obviously the ‘great work to will work for food’ path is one taken by the
film’s director, Peter Bogdanowitz, and I hope he at least figured out the
irony of what he was doing. As the only thing Bobby appears interested in
throughout this film, throughout this story which could be his life story, is
whether the limo which takes him back and forth the studio is comfy enough.
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