Mark Reviews Movies: STANDING UP, FALLING DOWN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 20, 2020

A dermatologist, wallowing in a pit of grief and regret, shouldn't be funnier than an aspiring comedian, who's also the story's protagonist, but that's the case with Standing Up, Falling Down. That's not the only issue with this movie, but it is a significant one.

Scott (Ben Schwartz), the comedian who returns home after four years of professional failure in Los Angeles, isn't very funny, especially when he's on stage performing. To be fair, this observation is part of the character's story, although it doesn't excuse that Scott's big, climactic return to the world of stand-up comedy features plenty of predictable and familiar jokes about being, well, a failed stand-up comedian.

His lack of success has made him bitter, and bitterness isn't what audiences are looking for in a comedian (As a counterpoint, the comedian's job, one could argue, is to make an audience believe that whatever they're saying is funny, but the philosophy of comedy definitely isn't a conversation this movie wants to have). That's the opinion of Marty (Billy Crystal), the dermatologist, whom Scott meets at a local bar and later visits to see about some stress-related hives on his arm.

Both Scott and Marty are at low points. Scott failed at his dream, is living with his parents, and can't get over Becky (Eloise Mumford), the woman he dumped when he went chasing after his ambitions. Marty's second wife died of cancer a year ago, and his son Adam (Nate Corddry) refuses to talk to him—since the second wife was "the other woman" in Marty's marriage to the son's mother, who committed suicide after a long battle with depression.

None of this sounds particularly funny, and for the most part, it isn't. Screenwriter Peter Hoare fills his story with assorted supporting characters and lots of situational complications to compensate for how despairing this material is.

On the one hand, we have Scott's family—his sarcastic sister Megan (Grace Gummer), who also lives at home, and his overly supportive mother (played by Debra Monk) and his father (played by Kevin Dunn), who treats his son with a familiar but far-from-loving acknowledgement of Scott's existence. On the other hand, we have Scott's borderline-stalker-like attempts to woo Becky, from crashing a funeral (where he accidentally tackles an elderly woman) to over-analyzing a single word in a quick conversation at the mall. Becky, as we discover, is in a boring marriage to Owen (John Behlmann), and in case one is wondering, yes, this conflict reaches its climax with a sequence of Owen chasing Scott through the neighborhood over a misunderstanding.

As it turns out, though, the movie doesn't need any of these extraneous characters and story elements. It has Crystal and, more importantly, the relationship between the two down-on-their-luck men.

As Marty, whose reliance on alcohol looks to be turning from a method of numbing the pain to a death wish, Crystal brings a quiet sense of real anguish to a movie that has little patience for quiet and little time for anything real (A late scene between Marty and Adam is the closest it comes, but that's dismissed by the next turn of the story). The character is funny, too, in that unassuming way Crystal has of being funny.

On a side note, the humor of and from the character—who offers that line about Scott being too bitter to be funny but whose off-the-cuff jokes are in that tone—does make one suspect that the character changed because of Crystal's presence, and there's a quick mention of Marty having a funny social media account, almost as an justification. It doesn't really matter, but as a result, it is odd that the one thing we expect—that Marty will offer some guidance on the comedy thing—never happens.

The movie is at its most effective when it simply lets Scott and Marty talk. They discuss their pasts and their dreams, now seemingly at an end, while getting high in a car or just lounging around Marty's house. There's an entirely different movie in these scenes—one about two characters whose respective outlooks on things put the other's pains and possibilities in a new, unexpected perspective.

That's not, though, the movie we actually get. Standing Up, Falling Down separates Scott and Marty, as the screenplay rushes through their attempts, for Scott, to figure out what he wants (as a career and in love) and, for Marty, to fix what he admits to breaking. The whole thing serves to remind us that there's at least one thing drama and comedy share: You can't rush it.

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