Writers' strike started early for 'Mama's Boy'
Something's off in the new comedy Mama's Boy.
OK, everything's off in this flailing, failed clone of "Mr. Woodcock" and "Failure to Launch."
It's the writing, of course. But the actors are the ones up there, looking and sounding like incompetents. They can't do much when the screenwriter started his strike a year early.
Start with Jon Heder. The once-and-always Napoleon Dynamite's limited range is put on naked display as a bratty, nerdy live-at-home 29-year-old who can't stand the thought of losing his special co-dependent relationship with his mom, something threatened by her new beau.
Heder, so deliciously angry and nerd-clueless in "Dynamite," so sweetly overmatched in "School for Scoundrels," is just lost here. Inexplicably dressed in 1980s New Wave gear with a Ric Ocasek-circa-1984 haircut, Heder can't summon up the bemused pity, the comic annoyance or pretty much anything entertaining in Jeffrey, the loser's loser he portrays here.
Yes, he lost his dad in 1990 and hasn't matured since. He plays vintage video games obsessively. He wears surgical gloves to re-read his preserved collection of vintage comics. He dons homemade armor and plays fantasy warrior games with other losers. Jeffrey is lazily killing time in a job at the "cool" used bookstore in scenic Santa Clarita (Eli Wallach is his aged boss). Socially clumsy, sexually inexperienced but smart enough to be sarcastic, he's still watching the skies. If he ever grows up, maybe he'll be the astronomer his late father always wanted to be.
His mom (Diane Keaton) isn't drawn in broad, smothering strokes. She isn't comically beaten down by her rude kid, either. Whatever Keaton-esque touches the actress brought to the set are all that's interesting about her character.
And the new man in her life? That's Jeff Daniels, playing the heck out of motivational speaker Mert Rosenbloom, a character with so little edge you wish Billy Bob Thornton had come by for a re-write, or at least a lecture on how this version of "Mr. Woodcock" should be written and played.
Mert is one of those "positivity" guys who tells corporate groups his story of colon cancer survival (the funniest and edgiest bit in the movie), a cheerleader who peppers conversations with borrowed aphorisms that he punctuates with "I wrote that."
"You are the author of your own life story," he lectures. "Why not make it a happy ending?"
"Mama's Boy" sets us up to discover some dark secret, some fraud in this Dr. Phil-style phony. Jeffrey must raise his game to battle this new competition. But the "war of wills" we brace for never happens. Daniels is up for it. Heder might have been able to play that, but the writing isn't there.
Anna Faris, losing her "Scary Movie" ditziness, turns up as the charming, sad barista at the local coffee joint, a proto-punk political singer-songwriter in the Phoebe-from-Friends mold. Why she'd be interested in a "freak" like Jeffrey is anybody's guess. And why she'd even unwittingly pitch in to help him find ways to bust up his mom's love affair is one of the many plot holes some clever studio exec or the director should have made the "Saving Silverman" writer fix in the screenplay stage.
Because, for its endless failings, there are odds and ends that work here. This situation has paid off in other comedies. But writer Hank Nelken never quite draws a bead on the subject or the characters. And when the writer's this far off, the actors, then the audience, are the ones who pay the price.
H (out of 5) Cast: Jon Heder, Diane Keaton, Jeff Daniels Director: Tim Hamilton Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes Industry rating: PG-13 for language including sexual references, and some drug use.