Dir. Robert Weide, UK, 2008, 110 mins
Cast: Simon Pegg, Jeff Bridges, Kirsten Dunst
Review by Carol Allen
Journalist Toby Young undoubtedly has brass neck. After a disastrous move from London to Manhattan to work on the prestige magazine Vanity Fair, where he came totally unstuck and did exactly what it says in the title, he came home to the UK and wrote a best-selling memoir about his failure. This is the film of that book.
It’s been softened in tone and given shape and some sort of coherent story. It also has Simon Pegg playing Toby, now renamed Sidney and Pegg’s likeable personality does a lot to humanise the reputedly rather obnoxious Mr Young. Even so, the character as written is such a tactless, obnoxious and vain prat in the opening scenes of the film that it takes even the cuddly Mr Pegg a while to engage our sympathies. Though to be fair most of the main characters in that first part are so self-obsessed and affected, even the lovely Ms Dunst, that you might well wonder if you’re going to be able to put up with their company for nearly two hours. But like Sidney, most of them start to behave like human beings after a while and what helps to engage one’s interest is the fact that this film has an exceptionally good cast, starting with cameos in the prologue from up-and-coming British actors such as James Corden, Chris O’Dowd and Fenella Woolgar as Sidney’s colleagues in London and then moving on to the Hollywood brigade.
Bridges, still sexy in middle age, dominates his scenes as former idealist and now sold old editor Clay Harding, played as a sort-of cleaned up Big Lebowski grown older with shaggy, long hair and a really scary manner, until he later loosens up. "Don’t call me Clay", he snarls at the over familiar Sidney. Dunst is Alison, the ambitious young journalist, who reluctantly tries to teach Sidney the rules of the American media game and eventually warms to her protégé. Gillian Anderson plays the all-powerful PR, who exerts total controls over her clients’ image and without whose good will no journalist gets a look in. The clients in question include Megan Fox as up-and-coming film actress, Sophie Maes, and Max Minghella, as a pretentious young director. Also on hand are Danny Huston as the thoroughly unpleasant and pompous deputy editor, who’s giving Alison the runaround and Miriam Margolyes as Sidney’s colourful landlady. There are also some rather touching and cleverly used clips of Janette Scott in the movies she made in the 50s and 60s playing Sidney’s long-dead mother.
The love story between Sidney and Alison is a bit soppy, but very sweet, and the film is overall very funny with lots of good gags and an interesting mixture of comedy styles — character comedy, a bit of satire on Americans taking themselves too seriously, including a mock trailer for Sophie Maes’ forthcoming movie in which she plays Mother Theresa, which is a hoot and the sheer slapstick of a blackly humorous sequence involving Anderson’s dog, which rivals the one in There’s Something About Mary. Plus a pig who’s obviously out to steal the porcine laurels from Babe and the one in A Private Function.
The film’s not as consistently funny as one might have hoped it would be and it’s a bit slow in places, but overall it’s very entertaining. And don’t leave before the end credits otherwise you’ll miss more of Sophie’s gloriously awful performance as Hollywood’s idea of the young Mother Theresa.
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