Mark Reviews Movies: TANKHOUSE

Tankhouse, Vertical Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 12, 2022

Screenwriters Chelsea Frei and director Noam Tomaschoff feel a bit too close to the material with Tankhouse. The movie comes across as an extended inside joke about the particular and peculiar ways of those in the theatrical arts. It's authentic to an extent, but beyond that, the movie never finds a way to ground its characters, story, or humor.

The premise has Tucker (Stephen Friedrich), an egotist and devotee of avant-garde theater, and Sandrene (Tara Holt), his romantic and creative partner with a dream of making it as a television star, being run out of New York City, after someone dies in the middle of one of their company's performances (Christopher Lloyd has a glorified cameo as the gout-ridden, wheelchair-bound—which is a joke, apparently—founder of the company and Tucker's mentor). Cut off from their peers and funding from Tara's parents (played by Joey Lauren Adams and Andy Buckley in another pair of cameos), the two move to Sandrene's home of Fargo, North Dakota, for a performance competition. The winner will earn a residency at the city's local theater.

It's a fish-out-of-water story, in theory. That gag doesn't quite work, since almost everyone else in town is just about as odd as Tucker or nowhere near as strange as Tara. There's Yorick (Joe Adler), the owner of the bar where the two out-of-towners start up their new troupe, who is obsessed with Viking culture, and there's Uther (Devere Rogers), who has developed a severe visual impairment after attempting do-it-yourself laser eye surgery. The jokes of him running or bumping into things are obvious and relatively limited, although that doesn't forgive how lazy they are. As for the one about his disability making him some kind of prophet, let's just say that it's, well, interesting in its randomness.

Other company members come to include Leah (Nadia Alexander), a militant feminist, and a not-so-secret gay couple, Jack (Austin Crute) and Brady (Luke Spencer Roberts). The most relatable one might be Nina (Sara Yarkin), who's more a techie and not a fan of performing—especially in whatever kind of performances Tucker has planned.

Their main opponent in the competition is local theater legend Morten (Richard Kind, a good and amusing sport, as per usual, although his presence here is a tonic), who prefers traditional musicals and technical precision to Tucker's guerilla theater and improvisation. One of the cleverer setups here has Morten challenging Tucker to a rapid-fire battle of taking turns reciting Gilbert and Sullivan's "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General." It's the sort of premise that certainly proves Frei and Tomaschoff's bona fides, for those who care, but as a gag, it offers little beyond the setup and definitely doesn't have much of a punch line (save for the lyrics causing physical damage, punctuated by wacky sound effects that are a constant and feel like a crutch here).

Anyway, Tucker becomes more demanding and controlling of the troupe, putting them in awkward situations and forcing them to rehearse for hours. Sandrene reconnects with her high school boyfriend Hank (Alex Esola), who platonically consoles her about Tucker dismissing her TV ambitions. Tucker, of course, suspects there's something else going on between them, which makes him even more irritating as a character. That's saying something, although, to be fair, Friedrich's performance at least knows that Tucker is a fool and plays the role as such (A couple of throwaway gags worth a chuckle include his mispronunciation of terms and a heavy-handed example of bad iambic pentameter).

Morten tries to sabotage the newcomers with emotional spies (a couple of Method acting jokes to, again, prove the filmmakers' legitimacy) and emotional manipulation (A melodramatic scene of relationship woes ends up looking like, well, the performance of a melodramatic scene of relationship woes). Meanwhile, everyone behaves with such over-the-top flourishes of the eccentric that there's little to level out the silliness. The formulaic plot feels like a placeholder for something more or just an excuse for all of these caricatures to co-exist.

Tankhouse runs its thin gag, its thinner characters, and its thinnest of stories into the ground early and often. That the movie continues, despite failing to add anything new or unique to its established routine of oddness, might be the most substantial evidence of the filmmakers' theatrical authenticity: The show must go on, no matter how hopeless it may be.

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