One Good Film: "Listen Up Philip"(2014)
Alex Ross Perry's portrait of an author in love with himself is a low-key modern classic.
A regular feature for paid Watch List subscribers: I suggest one reasonably under-the-radar movie from the recent or distant past, and you do what you want with that information.
“Listen Up Philip” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, streaming on Peacock and Kanopy; for rent on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere)
Comedies about awful people aren’t for everyone, but when they’re done right, as in Alex Ross Perry’s arch, agile literary farce, the results can be a joy. When I reviewed this for the Boston Globe back in 2014, I called it “the best movie you’ll read all year,” and Perry makes this story of a self-absorbed writer as close to an actual paperback as he can, with judicious narration by Eric Bogosian and a title-credits font that screams Philip Roth. That particular connection doesn’t end there: When the enfant terrible novelist Philip Lewis Friedman (Jason Schwartzman, above right) travels upstate to visit his mentor, a misanthropic legend named Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce, above left), the archetypal Roth-ian male — on the page and off — gets a double-barrelled dose of satire. Even the title seems to be calling the novelist and his legion of imitators to account.
Schwartzman (I wrote in 2014) is a fine actor, but he has a knack for creating characters you want to punch in the face, and Philip, who has a second novel coming out and is intent on burning all his bridges, is almost marvelously obnoxious. Especially to his live-in girlfriend Ashley (Elisabeth Moss of "Mad Men"), who, after three years, has had about enough.
Perry is an underrated all-American original, a truly independent filmmaker who goes his own way, when he goes at all — he’s been mostly silent since 2018’s “Her Smell,” which features one of Moss’s most fearless performances as a Courtney Love-style rock star. You can tell that “Listen Up Philip” is less about its title character than about the people who suffer him when the movie takes a left turn and simply follows Ashley around for 20 minutes or so as she comes back to life post-Philip. What feels at first like a detour comes to seem an act of generosity to Ashley, to the woman playing her, and to the audience alike.
"Listen Up Philip" has a great deal of empathy for the women in the lives of these men who won't shut up: Ashley, Ike's daughter (Krysten Ritter), a fellow professor (Joséphine de la Baume) Philip starts seeing, an openhearted writing student (Maïté Alina). All these glorious women, lost on wretched, ridiculous men! What makes the movie more than bearable — what makes it a small, lucid classic of human comedy, in fact — is Perry's understanding that the women will heal, eventually, while the men will never stop gnawing at themselves.
The film's narration, coolly intoned by Eric Bogosian, possesses all the distance and perspective Philip lacks. Flowing at length, as though the movie itself were being read to us, it leads us to a final moment that's pitiless and unexpectedly moving. "Listen Up Philip" is a portrait of a man condemned to the prison of himself while his writing sets others free.
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