Director: Chris Pine
Writers: Chris Pine, Ian Gotler
Stars: Chris Pine, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Danny DeVito
Synopsis: Darren Barrenman is an unwavering optimist and native Angeleno who spends his days looking after the pool of the Tahitian Tiki apartment block and fighting to make his hometown a better place to live.
At the opening of Poolman, there is a sequence that lulls and cradles us into a process. The process is testing and maintaining a small pool. We watch Darren (Chris Pine) in this process and it shows dedication to a craft. The craft of filmmaking is on display here, as well, with Pine as director leading his craftspeople into a stellar sequence. Matthew Jensen as cinematographer builds the sequence capturing several points of view to help us understand the process. Editor Stacey Schroeder cuts the sequence into a beautiful flow that speeds up and slows down like the waves in the tide. It’s a tremendous shame the rest of the film doesn’t live up to this potential.
The tragedy about this comedy is that the script’s an absolute mess. Chris Pine and Ian Gotler obviously wear their influences on their sleeves with the overlapping dialogue of Robert Altman, the comedic ensemble tenor of the Coen brothers, and the convoluted, twisting plots of Robert Towne. The problem is that none of that works in concert with each other. That overlapping dialogue is nonsense and aggravating, Darren (Chris Pine) isn’t anywhere near The Dude’s charming slacker, and to have a complex convoluted plot you need to come up with your own instead of cribbing all the answers from Towne’s masterpiece, Chinatown.
It’s ridiculous that an L.A. noir pastiche would twist itself in so many knots referencing Chinatown so overtly. So overtly in fact that Darren himself begins to just tell everyone else how much like Chinatown this situation is. Poolman almost begs its audience to walk out of this film and watch a much better one instead. It’s likely because Poolman doesn’t know what it wants to be. It is a comedy, but it’s not funny in a laugh out loud kind of way. It’s funny in that way in which you recognize the comedy of a scene and can nod along noting the humor inherent there.
It’s likely that the film loses its way because its protagonist is so unlikeable. Not unlikeable like a Diablo Cody heroine, like most people in a Yorgos Lanthimos film, or a Paul Schrader diarist. He’s unlikeable because he’s a tremendous narcissist in the most uninteresting of ways. Darren masquerades as an activist, a person who cares about making Los Angeles better for people, but only wants to make Los Angeles better for his own nostalgia. He cares so little about the actual feelings of the people who surround him, is so lost in his head about everything around him, that the character actually sucks the charm out of any performance Chris Pine could give and that man has more charisma than two of the four currently famous handsome white guy Chrises combined. Which is why it’s sad that the only scene where Darren isn’t steamrolling over someone else and actually listening ends without him learning the true lesson underneath.
Yes, there is a pointedly good scene within Poolman. It comes as Stephen Toronkowski (Stephen Tobolowsky) finishes a performance of his secret passion project and Darren confronts him in the dressing room. Darren is thinking he has it all figured out. Toronkowski, Darren’s foil on the L.A. city council, sits the poolman down and has an intimate talk with him. They share a beautiful moment of honesty and humanity. It’s an actual conversation with give and take. It’s a breath of fresh air the way it is because of the genius of Tobolowsky’s performance style. Even in an out of character outfit, the actor can find a beautiful slice of character work. It’s cut way too short because Darren has to get back to his Chinatown shenanigans, but it gives a tiny glimmer of hope that the film could have had a point or something under its surface. When taken as a whole, it’s obvious Poolman is just window dressing.
Poolman is anachronistic, derivative, pointless style over substance. The most irksome affectation isn’t in the cars from the early 20th century or the fact that they use outdated physical media, but in that there are two tough guys with no lines dressed exactly like Crockett and Tubbs from the “Miami Vice” TV show. Is this a reference to police corruption? Is this a nod to a great detective show? Are these characters detectives of some kind? It’s never made explicit and the answer is probably inane. Poolman is full of tedium like this. It dives deeply into unfunny absurdity, wanting us to wade in with it, so it can drag us to the deep end and dunk us into a passionless film full of uninteresting noodles of ideas. It has so much potential, but, like its main character, it is too full of itself to actually want to succeed.
