(MENAFN- Arab Times) 
Kinnear needs to go for inner demons
There's a feeling I always have when
I'm watching Greg Kinnear in a movie. He can be a terrific actor (as the '60s
TV star and sex addict Bob Crane in 'Auto Focus', as the inventor of the
intermittent windshield wiper in 'Flash of Genius', doing his
what-the-hell-let's-let-it-rip dance to 'Super Freak' at the end of 'Little
Miss Sunshine'). Yet even when he's just okay, Kinnear seems like such a nice
guy that I want him to succeed – I feel almost protective of him, as if he were
my little brother (even though he's now 56, albeit a still-boyish 56). That
more-than-skin-deep geniality is the source of Kinnear's appeal, going all the
way back to his hosting gig on 'Talk Soup', where he had the weird ability to
invest even pure snark with good vibes.
Given that, when I watched 'Phil', the
first movie Kinnear has directed (he also stars in it), you can bet that the protective
impulse was in high gear. Yet 'Phil', I have to report, is one of those
precious indie nothings that hits you like dandelion fluff. It's the sort of
film that still has its original, now-changed title on the opening credits (it
used to be called 'The Philosophy of Phil'), and that was actually a better
title. But someone up the chain of investment command must have looked at it
and thought, 'Let's get rid of that pesky ten-dollar word philosophy,' and the
result is that we're left with a title so minimal and generic that it
practically screams, 'Don't bother seeing this.' 'Phil' is a trifle, and
there's no harm in that, but it's an unconvincing trifle. The words 'coy' and
'whimsical' scarcely do justice to its coy whimsicality.
Yet there's a seed of a decent idea here.
Kinnear plays – yes – Phil, a dentist in Portland who is recently divorced and
thinks that his life is over. He's in a serious post-split funk, with a shabby
apartment and a teenage daughter (Megan Charpentier) who doesn't like to spend
time there. The film opens with one of those over-the-top ersatz suicide
attempts – Phil, bearded and disheveled, in his white dentist's coat, stands on
a bridge and considers taking the leap, with '(I Never Promised You A) Rose
Garden' playing on the car radio – that have been a staple of coy whimsical
comedies since 'Harold and Maude'. We know he won't jump, because there
wouldn't be a movie if he did.
Inexperience
Back in the office, where Kinnear reveals
his inexperience as a director by staging routine scenes of dental procedure
without getting the details right (really? he's going to shove the suction tube
in and out of someone's mouth instead of simply keeping it there?), Phil meets
a patient named Michael Fisk (Bradley Whitford), who appears to Have It All.
He's an award-winning professor who babbles about how well the history book he
wrote is selling. He mentions his beautiful wife who plays cello in the symphony,
talks about the romantic time he spent in Greece, and about how, as Socrates
said, 'The unexamined life is not worth living' – though the script, by Stephen
Mazur, turns that line into a motif without quite getting what it means. When
Phil explains that he always wanted to take his daughter to Greece but never
did, and Michael uses that quote to support the idea that Phil should just go
for it, the movie seems to be conflating 'the unexamined life…' with 'seize
the day.' Hey, it's all just high-end middlebrow movie stuff!
Phil, after that office encounter,
decides that Michael is a man with the perfect life – the rose garden – that
somehow eluded him. So he starts to stalk him, yearning to know the secret of
his existence. But then Michael, out of nowhere, does something devastating. It
turns out that he is not the happy camper he seemed. And Phil has to find out
why. It's as if his very identity depended on it.
He spends the rest of the film
insinuating himself into the life of Michael's wife, Alicia (Emily Mortimer),
by pretending to be Spiros Papalapadopoulos, Michael's old friend from Greece,
who Kinnear impersonates as if he were auditioning to be the mascot on a
package of frozen moussaka. As 'Spiros', he drinks bottles of ouzo, listens to
tapes of bouzouki music, and wears a Greek fisherman's cap that becomes his
signature. He also speaks in a 'Greek accent' so mild and generic that Kinnear
might just as well be impersonating an Israeli tailor or a Balkan terrorist.
(It's the Esperanto school of adorable fake 'foreign' acting.) And could a
movie like this be complete without Zorba-the-Greek dancing? No, it could not,
and yes, it is cringe-worthy – though the scene where Phil is called up to
dance with a bunch of actual Greeks, and has to fumble around, might have been
funny had it been pushed to full Leslie Nielsen-in-'Naked Gun' absurdity.
Kinnear is best playing characters with
an acerbic awareness to them; he's not so good playing semi-clueless bumblers.
Phil, though he shows some sneaky acumen in his drive to impersonate Spiros, is
too innocuous a presence to draw the audience to him. Even in his depression,
he's cuddly. The movie is about how he learns to love life again by giving
himself over to his make-believe alter ego, and if Kinnear had pushed that idea
further, it might have jelled. He would have done well to play Spiros as a guy
who's not so nice. But niceness, in itself, is no longer working for Kinnear.
He needs to go for inner demons. (RTRS)
By Owen Gleiberman
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