The Many Lives of Jonah Hill

[This story contains light spoilers for Outcome.]

Jonah Hill has lived many lives since audiences first got to know him in comedies like Knocked Up and The Forty Year Old Virgin. Just consider his cameo on last week’s Saturday Night Live, in which he appeared during the opening monologue to welcome Jack Black into the Five Timer’s Club along side Tina Fey, Candice Bergen and others.

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Hill’s own five hosting gigs on SNL are a study in the many swerves his career has taken. When he first hosted in 2008, he was fresh off co-starring in the raunchy teen comedy Superbad, cementing himself as the smart, schlubby comedy guy. By his third hosting gig in 2014, he was joined onstage during his monologue by Leonardo DiCaprio, his co-star in the searing satire The Wolf of Wall Street, a Martin Scorsese picture that netted Hill his second Oscar nomination for best supporting actor after Moneyball just three years earlier. By 2018, when Hill was welcomed into the Five-Timers’ Club by Fey and Bergen, he had transformed again, this time into the director of the feature Mid90s.

Last week’s cameo was timely, of course, because Hill has a new movie out, Outcome. He directs, co-writes and co-stars in the feature that saw him earn attention for his physical transformation months before it arrived. It’s also a film that is difficult to watch without drawing parallels to both Hill’s odd and unexpected arc, as well as the real-life controversies that could have sunk his career.

Outcome focuses on a Hollywood star terrified of being canceled. Keanu Reeves plays Reef Hawk, a world-renowned movie star with two Oscars to his name. But Reef is also five years sober from a destructive heroin addiction that the adoring public thankfully is unaware of. He and his devoted high-school friends (Cameron Diaz and Matt Bomer), and his outlandish crisis attorney Ira (Hill, bald and with a bushy gray beard), have worked hard to keep his public image clean. That’s why the potential of a mysterious videotape with supposedly awful material on it leads Reef on an apology tour to make amends and suss out who may have the tape and why they want to reveal it to the world.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Outcome is that it has many fascinating aspects amidst truly obnoxious comedic choices and thuddingly obvious commentary about separating the art and the artist. (The latter is helpfully displayed via a smug bumper sticker.) Hill co-wrote the film with Ezra Woods, and may think he’s making a salient commentary by having a character note that being anti-Semitic no longer stops you from being successful, and then cutting to a large portrait of Kanye West. (Recent events in the United Kingdom may suggest otherwise.)

But the aspects of Outcome that resonate have nearly nothing to do with the nonsensical specter of cancel culture. Instead, it’s watching Reeves interact in this mercifully brief 83-minute film with a variety of performers whether or not he has shared history with them, from Diaz and Bomer to Susan Lucci as Reef’s mother and even, yes, Scorsese as the star’s first manager.

But to consider the other half of Outcome, you can’t help but reflect on Hill’s career. Since 2016, Hill has appeared in just five live-action films, this one included. (He’s got another comedy, Cut Off, set to open this summer.) But when he first became famous, he proved to be an immensely enjoyable performer in everything from the outrageously hilarious Jump Street movies to Moneyball to Cyrus.

He didn’t have quite the career Reef Hawk had. (The fictional character feels like a mild corollary to Reeves himself, or perhaps someone like Hill’s Moneyball co-star Brad Pitt when you factor in Oscar victories.) But Hill was able to jump from comedy to drama, and also flexed his behind-the-camera muscles with Mid90s.

In 2022, he turned heads by announcing he would no longer do interviews due to anxiety. The same year, he released his Netflix documentary Stutz, about his relationship with his therapist. It seemed like a surprisingly honest inward look. But after that, this was put in a new light after an ex-girlfriend painted Hill as a “misogynist narcissist,” accused him of controlling behavior, and shared some of their text messages — all of which damaged Hill’s public persona.

Outcome, with its setup, is all but built to make you compare Hill to Reef with his unhealthy focus on what strangers think of him coupled with an unwillingness to behave decently.

“Not many people can relate to a movie star, but the way I view it is, we’ve all turned ourselves into scorched, middle-aged movie stars by putting our lives up for judgment on social media every second of every day,” Hill told Scorsese in an interview published this week. “You go through the same exact feelings being Tom Cruise as you do being a mom in Salt Lake City putting her kids up online for public judgement.”

In Outcome, the tape in question within the film ends up being, if not innocuous, relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. It isn’t quite much ado about nothing, but Hill seems to be trying out an argument that stressing out so much about how others perceive you is almost as bad, if not just as bad, as what would make anyone want to cancel any celebrity.

Outcome boasts an impressive ensemble, and because so much of the film is structured as conversations between Reeves and one co-star after another, it’s not entirely without merit. But the basic idea that the desperate push to punish those for their misdeeds is almost as bad as the misdeeds themselves is ridiculous; to be fair, it’d be nonsense no matter who was arguing that.

At one point, Ira and Reef have what amounts to a heart-to-heart, with a massive portrait of Kevin Spacey looming over them in the background. Aside from the glib visual gag, it’s worth noting that while few people truly have been “canceled” since the arrival of the #MeToo movement, Spacey’s about as close as they come.

Jonah Hill has been called out for allegedly poor behavior, yes, but he’s still able to make a slick-looking low-stakes comedy-drama with a massive cast and the backing of one of the biggest technology companies in the world. It’s hard to imagine that the goofy dude from Accepted, the 2006 college comedy where he dressed up in a hot dog costume and tells people to ask him “about my wiener” has come to this point of egregious self-defense. But he’s protesting just a bit too much.

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