Bradley Cooper seems to have avoided a major potential pitfall for his three directorial effort, Is This Thing On? The divorce dramedy starring Will Arnett and Laura Dern follows a married couple who decide to separate and the impromptu stand-up comedy sessions that result from the break.
But the stand-up isn’t the point!
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“Is This Thing On? is much more about a relationship than it is about comedy, which is probably a good thing, given how difficult it is to make movies about stand-up,” explains Vulture’s Alison Willmore. “Fictional comics on screen tend to skew toward being tortured truth-tellers or delusional sociopaths or both, but Alex Novak, played by Will Arnett, is neither.”
Inside, critics who saw Is This Thing On? as a part of the New York Film Festival have praised the film for its gentleness and strong lead performances.
“In Cooper’s tenderly observed third feature, Is This Thing On?, performance is a rebound reflex, a therapeutic means of working through the end of a marriage and stumbling onto the self-discovery necessary to process what went wrong — inadvertently realizing that the foundations on which it was built remain intact,” writes The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney. “It’s an unassuming comic drama that sneaks up on you, its emotional honesty fueled by gorgeous performances of unimpeachable naturalness from Will Arnett and Laura Dern.”
A handful of write-ups pay special attention to Arnett, who finds himself in somewhat unfamiliar territory — as the lead in of a film from a five-time Best Picture nominee like Cooper.
“It’s an observant, bittersweet, and highly watchable movie, yet there’s an inner softness to it, a slightly pandering quality,” writes Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman. “Will Arnett, who has the look and demeanor of a less energized Michael Keaton, is a likable enough actor in a slightly mopey way, but he has done a lot of sitcom work, and it shows. In Is This Thing On?, Arnett seems, in essence, to be playing Alex as a sitcom dad — sharp-tongued yet benign, lost in his daze of self-interest, with an essential quality of harmlessness that’s the opposite of movie-star danger.”
But no everyone was sold on Cooper’s unorthodox approach to shooting, which involved him hoisting the camera onto his own shoulders.
“Cooper, again working with cinematographer Matthew Libatique (who cameos as a comic in the Olive Tree Café), operates the camera himself, which appears to create a less visible illusion of immediacy or intimacy, with the 1.66:1 aspect ratio giving the film the physical dimensions of a European character study,” writes IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio. “The price of Cooper taking the camera into his own hands, no matter how closely he smooshes it onto his actors’ faces, is self-indulgence.”
Is This Thing On? opens in theaters Dec. 19.
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