Comedy drama rarely seems to work. For every Alexander Payne, there are a thousand voyages of self-discovery sinking shortly out of port. I assume the plan is for the comedy to cover the lack of depth and the drama to make up for a humour shortage. Or more charitably, for the two to enhance each other. Either way, it usually fails. And so it goes with Are You Here, the disappointing feature debut from Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner.
It starts promisingly enough. Owen Wilson breezes through the motions as Steve, part-time local weatherman, part-time stoner. He is an insincere charmer living off lies and loans, a rampant womanising adolescent. When not stumbling through the job, or conning a succession of one night stands, Steve gets high with old school friend and inveterate screw-up Ben (Zach Galifianakis), the kind of guy who rails against humanity in countless pages of hand scrawled prose.
Initially, there is a pleasant bout of amiable comedy as Steve switches between his two worlds. That is until Ben’s father dies and they decamp to the family farm for the funeral and a battle over the will with Amy Poehler’s tetchy sister Terry. Here the wheels start to come off as Steve’s narcissistic shallowness and Ben’s mental illness become problems Weiner must solve.
With drama to the fore, it all becomes drearily predictable. Accompanied by heart-warming music, Steve undergoes a conversion to sober respectability, mostly in order to win the heart of Ben’s much younger, attractive step-mother Angela. Played blandly by Laura Ramsey, she’s a free-spirited non-entity existing solely to aid the boys on their way to maturity. Ben’s serious mental health problems are side-lined to focus on Steve’s painfully forced self-improvement. The culmination is a moment of horribly staged realisation as he breaks down over the sight of a ruined tree he had removed to perve over the woman in the flat opposite.
Wilson and Galifianakis aren’t to blame. They stroll through roles both have played before without the need to stretch even the tiniest acting muscle. At least they get screen time. Poehler is completely wasted as the nagging scold, a semi-villain caught in the dead zone between sinister moustache twirling and fragile self-esteem. No one else gets the chance to do much, although there’s a nice little cameo from director Peter Bogdanovich as an unruffled judge.
All of this adds up to not very much. From the man who mixed suave style, killer dialogue and pointed social commentary into one of the best television shows this side of the millennium, Are You Here is an irritatingly tepid misfire.
Director: Matthew Weiner
Writer: Matthew Weiner
Stars: Owen Wilson, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Poehler
Runtime: 114 min
Country: USA
Film Rating: 
