Within the first few minutes of Andrew Wagner's new film The Talent Given Us, we are aware that we watching real people up there on the screen. The filmmaker's actual parents, Judy and Allen Wagner, play a couple in their 60s named Judy and Allen Wagner. He's a retired stockbroker who's suffering a real bear market in the health department, and she's a willful, foul-mouthed old dame who's looking to have some fun. Early on, we sense some darkly funny moments could be in the offing. He gives off a whiff of a badly aging playboy trapped in the body of Francis Coppola, and she has the ballsy panache of the feisty old birds once played by Ruth Gordon or Elaine Stritch.
Sex or the lack of it is Topic A.
"What are we going to do about our sex life. It sucks!"
"All those drugs."
But it's soon clear that Judy and Allen have made their bed, and we're not surprised when the angry salvo "I want a divorce!" gives way to the decidedly practical "You hungry?"
Writer/son Andrew may be mining the museum of a once-combative marriage whose combatants can longer put in the ring rounds. It turns out that the real ache in this marriage is the absence of Sonny. Ultimately The Talent referred to in the title is that of the film's creator, who imagines his lovely family, including two grown but show-biz-neurotic sisters, jumping in an SUV (because Mom hates to fly) and heading out to LA, where son Andrew is teaching rudimentary writing to former gang members while he tries to finds backers for 500-page screenplays.
Whatever charms the Wagner family possesses in their native New York habitat are soon lost in America.
A brief reprise of Judy and Allen's dysfunctional sack-time — "I want you to fuck me!" "Wake me in an hour." — gives way to the sickening banality of the sisters' body and therapy issues.
Even a novice member of the Screen Actors Guild would probably have a major hissy-fit over some of the grotesquely close close-ups that Wagner, directing his first feature, uses to capture the scripted antics of his nuclear family unit. One almost never gets this physically close to people, except during sex. Now, I've definitely had my fill of good and bad incest drama this month, and fortunately The Talent Given Us doesn't go there, but it does feature a large dollop of whining and mutual recriminations that only play well if coming from the pen of Larry David or Eugene O'Neill.
In some ways, Judy Wagner is a female Larry David just waiting for a grievance worthy of her. David's Curb Your Enthusiasm derives much of its outlandish charm from our guilty joy at watching Larry's character make an ass of himself by totally rejecting the needs of others. Like the non-criminal side of Tony Soprano, Larry David's inner child screams as loudly as we might want ours to, if only we could construct a fictional parallel universe that abjectly caters to our worst instincts. When David makes a scene at a fancy restaurant demanding that a waiter return a "second tip," we cringe and laugh, because our Ids would love to be so fed. When Judy makes an Iowa waitress take back an "over-aged" steak, the moment possesses only the false boorishness of a Jack-in-the-Box TV commercial.
Edge play
If you want to spend some amusing and moving road-time with a splendidly screwed-up family, I suggest Googling the DVD whereabouts of a unusually good first feature from a Chinese-born female filmmaker whose family was scarred by the Cultural Revolution.
In See You Off to the Edge of Town, a once tightly-knit Chinese clan's car trip to the Grand Canyon becomes a catalyst for the revelation of deeply buried family secrets. Ching Ip's debut feature shows a deft talent for non-sitcom humor to get at character. Younger daughter Maggie uses the claustrophobic setting of a second-hand hearse to drop a bombshell: she's moving to Indonesia with a punky boyfriend she met on the Internet. Older sister Jenny resents her label as the family's spinster, while Mom and Dad are quietly imploding under the impact of Dad's extramarital affair.
Ching Ip, with an intuitive grasp for the last-chance-saloon solitary nature of American Western life, makes excellent use of an eclectic supporting cast of native actors to flesh out her story and give us a break from subtitles. Other cool alternatives to films currently playing can be found in my columns at www.claudesplace.com.