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BERNARD AND HUEY
Director: Dan Mirvish Cast: Jim Rash, David Koechner, Mae Whitman, Sasha Alexander, Bellamy Young, Nancy Travis, Jay Renshaw, Jake O'Connor, Richard Kind, Eka Darville, Shelby Fero MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:31 Release Date: 6/8/18 (limited) |
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Capsule review by Mark Dujsik | June 7, 2018 To watch Bernard and Huey is to play a game of trying to decide which of the two main characters would make more irritating company. There's Bernard (Jim Rash), a guy who won't stop talking about his failed marriage (of six weeks), and then there's Huey (David Koechner), who seems to skirt through life, despite having no apparent talents and while treating people like garbage. We spend most of the movie, written by Jules Feiffer, waiting for one or both these men to receive their comeuppance, if only so that it can make an obvious point. Instead, one of them is more or less rewarded for doing the bare minimum of getting his life together, while the other remains completely unaware of how annoying he is. As a study of long-term arrested development, director Dan Mirvish gets a lot of help from his central performances. Rash is spot-on in the way Bernard is oblivious to how desperate and clingy he sounds in bed with a series of women, who, strangely, are more than content to let him whine about his love life. Koechner has a certain way of seeming as if Huey was once charming enough to get a woman's attention, although now he's just a mess. The story has Huey reuniting with Bernard at the latter's New York City apartment, some 25 years after their last meeting. Huey is running away from his daughter Zelda (Mae Whitman), who begrudgingly traveled across the country to rescue him from a forgotten haze involving marijuana in Colorado. Bernard ends up dating Zelda, and feeling insecure about how his previously woman-less friend is scoring notches on the bedpost, Huey tries to knock his old friend down to his former level. The movie doesn't think much of any of its characters. The eponymous pair have no self-awareness, and the women in their lives exist for them to bed and/or to betray. Bernard and Huey occasionally cuts back to the main characters' younger selves (played by Jay Renshaw and Jake O'Connor), just to emphasize how they haven't changed in a quarter of a century. They don't change in any meaningful way here, either, and the aimless story of the two men continuing in their ways ends up as static as them. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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