Big or small nonsense – Kommersant

Lies Big or Little, directed by American director Michael Maren, tries to be caustic, witty, relevant and heartfelt. Followed these noble efforts Andrey Plakhov.

The main character named Shriver (Michael Shannon) works as a janitor, plumber, in general, a guy on the hook in a New York apartment building. He put an end to his ambitions, if they were, he lives as a bean with a ginger cat and quietly becomes an inveterate drunkard in the company of a degraded marginal like him. Suddenly, Shriver receives a letter from the fictional Acheron University inviting him to a literary festival hosted by writer and teacher Professor Simone Cleary (Kate Hudson). The festival, held in the backwoods, is dying out, it has not been visited by celebrities for a long time, and it is threatened with total cuts in the budget. Shriver is mistaken for his namesake, the enigmatic writer who published The Time of the Goats twenty years ago. At the peak of his fame, when Bill Clinton was waiting for him for the next honoring, the author of the “manifesto of the generation” disappeared from the literary horizon. Something inspired by the fate of Salinger and similar literary recluses, only turned into a parodic plane.

The filmmakers use this plot to mock the mores of academic, university, and near-literary circles. And they make a lot of efforts to play them satirically, much like Ruben Ostlund did with the priests of sovriska in the movie “The Square”. Every now and then, sacramental phrases are pouring from the screen, claiming to be murderous. For example: “Many writers don’t write. And then they complain that they do not write. And then they write about what they don’t write.” Or: “You don’t understand the beauty of online journalism. Nothing is more than everything.” Or else: “We create fiction as a laboratory to give meaning to reality.” And, of course, satirical arrows were shot at the pseudo-intelligent slogan of the writers’ conference “Truth, Fiction and Alternative Facts.”

The film is populated with characters meant to be funny, like the grouchy, perpetually screwy, horse-riding professor of English (Ben Johnson) or the horny rich woman (Wendy Malick) who has slept with all the great writers and is now trying to drag Shriver into her bed pantheon. But he lusts for a black lesbian feminist who convicts him of patriarchal sexism and calls the cult novel he wrote “an overblown wet dream of a young macho.” More and more grotesque characters appear – a cop with a cigar who suspects Shriver of the murder, and a strange guy who claims that he is the real Shriver. Although the protagonist, at first toiling in the hotel from the ambiguous position he fell into, gradually gets into the taste of literary partying, and most importantly, begins to identify himself, the impostor, with a real writer and remember his past – real or fictional – life. It’s like two versions of Shriver, one of which reproaches the other for big or small lies.

The problem with this film is that it is an eclectic pile of things that are difficult to combine. On the one hand, it is a comedy of situations, playful satire – most often funny only in intentions, but in reality degenerates into pretentious implausible nonsense. On the other hand, a rom-com, in which Simone and Shriver begin to breathe unevenly towards each other. There is no chemistry between Kate Hudson and Michael Shannon, and it is painful to watch their attempts to portray the growing feeling. But there is also a third side: Shannon, an artist, in general, not the last one, seems to be starting to shoot his own film – an existential drama about a restless soul. You need to have the talent of the Coen brothers to weave all these genres, images and motifs into one team, but Michael Maren’s writing and directing is clearly not of that caliber. Probably, guessing this, he relies on well-known actors, but the result is so deplorable that it prompts reviewers to ask if Maren has compromising evidence that allows blackmailing the stars, otherwise why would they agree to act with him.

The film is based on the novel by Chris Belden “Shriver”, written eight years ago. During this time, a lot of things have changed in cultural life, but the film does not give a clue to many of the questions that logic poses before its plot twists and turns. It is not clear why the modern university, with its liberal-feminist agenda, is so worn with the creator of a seemingly conservative novel that begins with the phrase: “Water divorce appeared on the ceiling of my room on the day my wife left me.” But logic and artistic truth are the last things that drove the developers of this film project.