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PHIL
Director: Greg Kinnear Cast: Greg Kinnear, Emily Mortimer, Jay Duplass, Taylor Schilling, Bradley Whitford, Luke Wilson, Sarah Dugdale, Kurt Fuller, Robert Forster, April Cameron MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:46 Release Date: 7/5/19 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 4, 2019 It's not that you can't, couldn't, or shouldn't make a comedy about one person trying to figure out why another committed suicide. It can, though, easily be argued that such a story, in general, and one that adopts a comic tone, specifically, could and probably should approach that material with far more delicacy and thoughtfulness than is on display in Phil. Stephen Mazur's screenplay shows no such concern. It's not even rebelling against the concept of being sensitive to such matters, which means that the movie's insensitivity isn't a deliberate choice. This makes it more difficult to be angered by the material, but being confounded by it is almost a given. The setup has a depressed dentist named Phil (Greg Kinnear, who also makes his directorial debut here) contemplating suicide, only to be temporarily encouraged to the idea of life when Michael (Bradley Whitford) comes in for a check-up. Michael seems to have it all together—a solid family, a good teaching career, the surprise success of a book he wrote. Phil begins stalking him to discover the man's secret to happy living. Ultimately, Michael commits suicide, and Phil discovers the body. Now, he has a new quest: to learn why a happy man would end his own life. If such a man can't find a reason to live, what hope does Phil have? There are many problems with this premise, but somehow, the most obvious ones really don't matter once the actual plot emerges. Basically, Phil, after passing out by Michael's grave, is confronted by the man's wife Alicia (Emily Mortimer) To avoid facing the consequences of his behavior, the dentist pretends to be one of Michael's old friends from Greece. The rest of the story is an aggressively lazy situational comedy. Phil maintains his false identity to investigate Michael's life (renovating a bathroom in the process) and has to keep up the façade against the police, the man's suspicious colleagues, and his grieving family. One
could make a bevy of arguments about the multiple ways in which Phil
makes a potentially sympathetic protagonist into an inherently off-putting one,
overly simplifies mental health issues, displays no genuine consideration for
grief, and generally bypasses every serious element of its premise. The core of
the matter, though, is that the movie doesn't care enough about such things for
us to care about how wrong it gets them. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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