Meeting Spencer Dir. Malcolm Mowbray

[George G. Braunstein Productions; 2010]

Styles: farce
Others: The Producers, Noises Off, For Your Consideration

Badmouthing a film as modest as Meeting Spencer seems almost churlish. It aspires to be nothing more than a silly farce. But it fails to achieve even that goal, which might not be so modest after all — farce is harder than it’s supposed to look. The film isn’t completely awful, but not one element works. That humdrum title is only the beginning of its problems.

Over the course of a single dinner — during which everyone drinks a lot but hardly eats a bite — a pompous, washed-up stage director (Jeffrey Tambor) watches his plans for a big Broadway comeback collapse and reassemble themselves several times, in ways that are rarely funny or even remotely interesting. With a few minor exceptions, all of the action takes place inside a recreation of Frankie and Johnnie’s, the famed theater-district restaurant. The single-set concept is intended to ratchet up the comedic tension, but it only suffocates whatever humor might have been milked from the situations.

Farce depends on crack timing, which is why it generally plays better on stage — where it remains unbroken in time and space — than in the spliced-together performance of film. Meeting Spencer’s broad stock characters and stilted dialogue (complete with corny, smirking innuendo) might actually have worked in front of a live audience. But on screen, you can see the actors straining too hard for lightness, and the script comes across as bumbling and tin eared. Not only is the film set in the theater world, but also its structure and sensibility are doggedly stagebound and uncinematic.

It is depressing to watch talented actors like Tambor and Jesse Plemons (of TV’s Friday Night Lights) struggle to breathe life into such a doomed enterprise. The already slim hope that Meeting Spencer had of succeeding has been thoroughly dashed by the film’s distracting editing and sound design, not to mention its obnoxious, canned music score, which never fails to set precisely the wrong tone. Maybe Broadway will take a break from turning hit movies into plays and attempt to salvage this turkey.

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