AndrewBloom

4/10

Spoilers

[4.4/10] About a third of the way through this movie, I reassured myself that it was going somewhere with all of this. Yeah, Alan Alda’s character, history professor Michael Burgess, was being kind of a stubborn jerk to his girlfriend. Yes, him nitpicking the historical accuracy of a Hollywood movie made him seem like a stick in the mud. Sure, him ogling Michelle Pfieffer’s Tinseltown starlet, named Faith, while he was trying to get his girlfriend to move in with him was a little odious. But that’s okay! Characters need to start somewhere! That’s what makes it meaningful when they make a change for the better. So I figured Michael would learn how to compromise on his film, which would prompt him to compromise in his relationship. I figured something about being bossed around on a film set would make him realize it sucks when he tries to boss around his girlfriend. I assumed he’d realize that he was enamored with the figure from history Faith was playing, not the woman herself. Surely, there would be some point to all of this, right? They wouldn’t just sort of meander along an hour and forty-five minutes with no build to a meaningful ending, would they? I’m sad to report that they would, in fact, do that. *Sweet Liberty* is, at best, a bunch of loosely connected sketches clustered around the same general theme. Sometimes those sketches are about relationships. Sometimes they’re about Hollywood movie-making. Sometimes they’re about random nonsense. But whatever the content, they all feel like a random assembly of moments, instead of a story with narrative progression or character arcs or, you know, ideas. But hey, even that format could be alright if the jokes were...well...funny. (Mel Brooks basically thrives on it.) *Sweet Liberty* is filled to the brim with only the broadest humor, head-scratch-worthy gags, and insipid attempts at character comedy. When the best you can do is Lillian Gish mugging in nigh-constant reaction shots, you have a problem. As a film written and directed by Alan Alda, his character naturally gets a handful of good one-liners and reactions in. But the jokes here are more likely to leave you cocking your head and saying, “Huh?” than to provoke actual laughs. The charm and comedy, such as they are, mostly come from the performances. Bob Hoskins plays an insane goofball of a sidekick to Michael’s for much of the picture. He’s such a ball of energy though, and weirdly practical in contrast to Michael’s intransigence, that it wraps back around to become endearing. Michael Caine plays a reckless, womanizing leading man named Elliott. His character’s a low key antagonist and certainty a cad. But Caine seems like the only one in the picture having any fun, and his character ultimately seems so guileless, that it’s hard not to root for him over Alda. I feel the same way about Saul Rubinek’s character, as Bo, the director who’s filming an adaptation of Michael’s book. Rubinek is, as always, a pro. Again, he’s supposed to be something of an antagonist, blowing off Michael’s suggestions and insisting on a dumbed-down version of the historical narrative from Michael’s book. And yet, he comes off like a reasonable guy managing a lot of moving parts while an obstinate and persnickety author finds every excuse to get in his way. Frankly, there’s a better version of this film where Bo is the protagonist, or at least the perspective character, having to make this nutbar production work amid so much mishegoss from the cast and crew. Instead, we’re stuck with Alda-as-Michael and folks, I just don’t get it. I love Alda from his work in everything from *MASH* to *The West Wing* to *Marriage Story*. But his character is practically repugnant here, and sometimes just bizarre, which is tough when the success of the film seems to be banking on the audience rooting for him. His relationship with his girlfriend, Gretchen, is baffing. He seems all but desperate to get her to move in, despite her resistance. But he blanches at the very whiff of marriage. At some point, he bends just a little when she's good to his mother, but for the most part he seems to want to either bang her or needle her, with little indication that he actually enjoys spending time with her. On the other side of the film’s love dodecahedron, Michael does eventually realize that he was in love with the colonial figure Faith was embodying, not the woman herself. But that epiphany only comes after ten weeks of schtupping her and then stomaching the indignity of seeing her with Elliott, which makes him seem petty at best and a complete self-centered idiot at worst. And his big crusade is to ensure the historical accuracy of this big Hollywood production. There’s something noble, albeit naive, in that, but Michael comes off like an ass demanding the world bend to his will rather than an idealistic soul defending his life’s work. He’s rude, insistent, and ignores the good advice from Hoskins’ endlessly patient character to do the things necessary to get his vision on screen. Michael is mildly sympathetic when he argues for not changing the characterization of history’s heroes and villains, but comes off like a narrow-minded nitpicker when he gripes about the leaves on the trees or an actor wearing the wrong hat. Why in god’s name are we supposed to like this guy? There is, admittedly, something fun when Michael joins the local reenactors for the film’s climactic scene, and turns it into his own colonial revolt, replete with a wry offering of Bo’s crowd-pleading triumvirate of rebellion, destruction of property, and people taking their clothes off. However pigheaded Michael seems about the whole thing, it’s one of the few stretches of the film that play like enjoyable chaos with even a touch of cleverness involved in the setup and payoff. But once it’s over, the movie just sort of ends. After nearly an entire runtime of the characters ambling about from random scene to random scene, it just sends the Hollywood players away and reunites Michael and Gretchen without doing the work to show that they’ve fixed a single one of their problems or learned anything from the experience. Boom, this relationship that, by all rights, seems like it probably shouldn’t be a thing ends with more needling, negotiating down his level of commitment, and yet somehow, marriage and a baby? Uh, what? *Sweet Liberty* is miscalibrated at almost every level. It doesn’t work as a relationship piece. It doesn’t work as a Hollywood spoof. It doesn’t work as an extended farce. It doesn’t work as a series of small-town-meets-big-city sketches. And it certainly doesn’t work as a light Fourth of July watch, which was my intended purpose. With Alda’s name all over the place, a killer cast,and a solid premise, I walked into this one expecting fireworks. Instead, I got a dud.