Mark Reviews Movies: BIG GOLD BRICK

Big Gold Brick, Samuel Goldwyn Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 24, 2022

Writer/director Brian Petsos' debut feature is divided between the joke of its story and the self-seriousness with which the movie presents that tale. The actual content of Big Gold Brick comes across as a parody of someone's intentionally deceptive and self-important memoir, but with the movie's bloated narrative and straight-faced tone, the filmmaker appears to have bought into the very target of his own gag.

Here, we meet Samuel (Emory Cohen), a struggling writer of short fiction, with a heap of personal issues weighing him down, living a lonely life in a New York City apartment. His writing isn't making him money, and he's past due on the rent. His serious girlfriend left him about a year ago, nearly a year after the death of his mother, and as for his father, well, he hates the guy, who wanted him to take over the family's successful frozen custard business. The cold treat and its eventual prevalence within this tale kind of clue us in to the joke, at least, even if Samuel's overburdening of despair doesn't feel particularly amusing, except that it is so much.

In a state of blackout drunkenness, Samuel packs a suitcase, takes a cab to the train station, and arrives in Rochester without any discernable plan. Walking down a darkened road, the writer spots approaching headlights. He drops his case and walks toward the light of the car being driven by Floyd (Andy Garcia), who's distracted while eating some melting frozen custard.

Floyd later thinks it's some weird, cosmic twist of fate that he was eating that just before he hit Samuel, and just like how a series of tragic events led the writer to this place, the joke, perhaps, is how many coincidences have to happen for anyone's life to be worthy of a book. It's something like that, maybe, although Petsos keeps the punch line to himself, leaving us to scramble to figure out the setup in the first place.

We mostly can tell all of this, to some degree or another, is intended to be humorous. There's Cohen's performance, for example, which almost revolves around how many contorted facial reactions he can provide and how emotionally unstable Samuel is. In the aftermath of being hit by a car, the writer has a "miraculous" recovery, although some head trauma means his understanding of reality might occasionally be altered. This also leads to some running gags, such as a talking Santa doll that starts to criticize Samuel and the possibility that the writer might have developed some kind of superpower. These are the jokes, and while not particularly funny, their existence at least gives us a vague idea of Petsos' intentions.

The plot has Samuel living with Floyd, who wants the young man to write his biography, and the mysterious man's family. Samuel is hit on by his patron's wife Jacqueline (Megan Fox), develops a crush on Floyd's recovering-from-a-nervous-breakdown daughter Lily (Lucy Hale), and occasionally interacts with his brooding, pyromaniac son Edward (Leonidas Castrounis). A lot of the family stuff is either extraneous (the unfaithful wife and the son) or underdeveloped (the potential romance with Lily). Either way, it definitely adds to the overstuffed scope of the story, which also frames the entire yarn as Samuel, now older and having earned some success, going on a publicity tour for the book based on the story we're watching.

Most of this is focused upon Samuel's altered mental state and his relationship with Floyd, whom the writer eventually comes to see as a father figure. The big mystery is what Floyd does for a living, how he seems to know so much about psychology and Samuel's burgeoning powers, and how all of his background fits into his interest in high school basketball. The answers are pretty plain (although they give Oscar Isaac a chance to goof around as a severely burned crime lord with an uncertain accent), which, again, is probably part of whatever bigger joke and bigger point Petsos is attempting. Garcia's easy charm, sincerity, and deadpan delivery do add a certain level of mundane tragedy to this character, even if the payoff to the truth of his background takes the already-messy plot in an even more contrived direction.

The messiness, the convenience, and the inflated size of this plot are clearly a significant part of the point. All of those elements, though, come to define Big Gold Brick more than its obvious but neglected satire, or maybe the whole affair is as sincere as it seems—and, hence, even worse.

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