Reviews by Steven Lewis

THE CABLE GUY – ***

If you don’t like Jim Carrey already, you won’t like The Cable Guy.

If you do like Jim Carrey you still may not like The Cable Guy. I would say, if you are one of those that can truly appreciate that all Carrey’s roles rely to a remarkable degree upon the venting of anger – and can further appreciate the possible subtext of that – well, now you’re moving into the type of territory where it may be possible for you to enjoy this movie.

Let me state my position up front: I love this movie. When it came out I saw it five times in the theater, once even staying through two showings. To this day, I still do lines and bits from it with my friends. I truly think it is Jim Carrey’s greatest creation to date (and I’m a guy who thinks almost all his creations are pretty special). And yet I’m perfectly aware that, at the script level at least the movie has some fairly major problems, and that it was not designed to appeal to everybody. In fact, I’d say it may well have been meant to bite the hand that feeds it, to snarl its contemtpt to anyone who got close.

But snarling contempt has made Jim Carrey what he is today – especially in the Ace Ventura movies – and so really how different is it? In fact, for anyone who is a fan of Carrey and says the cable guy character is too violent, too angry, too downright hostile – well, they better go back and scrupulously examine just what drew them to Carrey in the first place.

Make no mistake about it, the Cable Guy as played by Carrey is truly a psychotic creation. And when comedy veers into the psychotic it is not always on firm ground. Here, though, I’d say Carrey himself goes through his stages of madness with absolute precision – first pest, then mild irritant, then major league hanger-on and finally all out nut job – and does it absolutely brilliantly, being both hilarious and truly scary at the same time. Even as you’re afraid of what he is going to do, you can’t stop laughing at the sheer lunatic invention that he brings to the role. Being simultaneously amusing and terrifying is a hard trick to bring off, and few would even attempt it, much less bring it off successfully. (As a comparison, I think Jack Nicholson in The Shining was really funny – but his funniness only served to undercut, not complement, his scariness).

Also here, for the first time, Carrey is working with a director who is just as inventive as he is. Ben Stiller brings a great cutting-edge visual style to the film, playing up the darkness while also accentuating well Carrey’s over the top cartoonishness. Again, that is a tough double line to have to tow, and he does it well. I really hope he gets a chance to direct more in the future, because I think he’s really good (and he’s a better director than he is an actor. He had a certain low key charm in “Flirting With Disaster” and “There’s Something About Mary” but I’m getting really tired of seeing him in films – he’s just not interesting enough. He belongs BEHIND the camera, where he’s great).

To sum up, if I were a teacher grading The Cable Guy as a final project, I’d give both its star and its director an A+ but its screenwriter only a B-. It’s just not as well thought out as it might have been, but what’s good about the movie is truly out of this world good. If you have a taste for dark comedy and like Jim Carrey even a little, this one’s for you.
-SL

MULTIPLICITY – ***

Though nowhere near as good as Groundhog Day (director Harold Ramis’s previous movie) this is still a solid comedy with several big laughs. Though its situation of a man cloning himself in order to make his life more manageable would have been an interesting one to play (like Groundhog Day) with a serio-comic focus, Multiplicity – despite some token moralizing – is pretty much content to play its premise for wacky farce. As such, however, it does an expert job: the timing in the scenes is impeccable and the interplay between the main characters is sharp and memorable. This is especially amazing since the “main characters” here are almost exclusively played by Michael Keaton. His ability to not only delineate between the four versions of himself, but also to play each of these “selves” off convincingly against the others is nothing short of superb. In my mind, this represents a much more awesome achievement than does Eddie Murphy’s similar multiple role-playing in The Nutty Professor – and here it’s not just pointless showboating (there was no reason besides vanity that Murphy had to play every member of his family), but absolutely intrinsic to the movie’s success. Essentially, the film rides on Keaton’s ability to do precisely what he does as well as he does. Multiplicity represents his funniest film work in years, and perhaps his best ever.

A couple of scenes in particular stand out as howlingly funny set pieces – such as the one in the restaurant and the one where the clones are left alone with Keaton’s wife, played by Andie McDowell. It’s a shame her character wasn’t at least a little bit more sketched in by the writers (compare this, for example, to her wonderfully three dimensional role in Groundhog Day) – it might have made the film a little fuller. In fact, none of the supporting characters are really given much to do here, making it solidly a one man show. But what a show! With Keaton truly hitting every comic grace note available, you don’t really have much time to notice or care about the lack of secondary characters. I have seen this film four times and it has yet to lose one iota of its hilarity or charm. Hey, how much more can you demand from a comedy?
-SL