On hearing about the feature debut from the creator of Mad Men, one of contemporary television’s most consistently groundbreaking and delicately arced shows, I was perhaps more intrigued than excited. A TV series like Matthew Weiner’s is so dependant on its saga-length running – its gradual narrative shifts and painstaking character developments – that I wondered how he might bring his talents to the more concise, and for some, restrictive, format of a feature film. And especially this; not the breed of dark and stylised drama through which Weiner made his name, but a comedy starring Zach Galifianakis and Owen fucking Wilson – neither of whom are necessarily renowned for the subtlety of their performances.
You Are Here features Wilson as a commitment-phobic hedonist and womaniser; in an agonisingly typical opening montage, the charming devil neatly summarises as much to a quick-cutting selection of women. He’s just out to have a good time, folks. Best bud, Galifianakis, is a manic-depressive stoner and conspiracy theorist, teetering on the edge of total breakdown. The death of the latter’s wealthy father brings them back to their rural hometown, where Wilson meets his best friend’s young hippie stepmother and oh so predictably begins to reassess his priorities.
I wish I could suggest there was even a hint of the nuanced character work that carries a show like Mad Men to be found here, but truthfully there just isn’t. Some of the developments are in fact so clunky that they border on insulting: Galifianakis’s miraculously rapid transformation, from schizo maniac to fully functional member of society, after finally accepting the necessity for medication, is dubious at best; Laura Ramsay’s role as the free-spirited and deeply maternal Angelina is plain creaky, and so is the implication that all Wilson needs – to be ‘saved’ from a life of alcoholism and general douche-baggery – is a caring woman like her. It’s laughably easy. More laughable, in fact, than the majority of the film’s actual jokes, which too often depend on Zach Galifianakis’s undeniable instinct for comedy, born out of his physicality, his delivery, his expressions – all, admittedly, very funny – but none of which owe much to Weiner’s tired and typical writing.
Leaving the cinema, I hear someone mention that Weiner wrote the script ten years ago. It shows. You Are Here is nothing more than run-of-the-mill rom-com, and a bad, thoroughly dated one, at that.
3/10
FP
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