Someone once said that when you talk about your marriage problems to a third party, all you’re doing is giving evidence at an inquest. The quote was hardly a vote of confidence in counsellors.
Alex (Will Arnett) deals with such problems idiosyncratically in Is This Thing On? (15A). Instead of using an individual person, he speaks to throngs of people, performing a stand-up act in a comedy club. He washes his dirty linen in front of a bunch of strangers, peppering his musings with large dollops of dry wit.
It seems to do him – and them – good, but how will his wife (whom he’s about to divorce) feel if she hears about it?
This is like a Woody Allen film, or even one by the ‘new’ Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach. Instead of that, we get Arnett. Facially, he resembles a man who has his fingerprints all over it – director, co-writer, co-producer – Bradley Cooper.
Alex’s wife, Tess, is played by Laura Dern, an actress with the deepest set of eyes in Hollywood. She goes big here, offsetting Arnett’s dourness with an OTT performance.
The storyline, inspired loosely by the life of the amiable Liverpudlian stand-up comedian John Bishop, unfolds in piecemeal fashion. Their marriage has lost its juice many moons ago. They’re now merely going through the motions, staying civil in front of their two pre-teen sons, a pair of ‘Irish twins’ as Alex tells us. (In other words, a year apart in age.)
Alex and Tess don’t speak about what exactly went wrong between them until well on in the film. This means we’re left to join the dots from Alex’s quirky anecdotes and Tess’ scattergun musings about getting back to the days when volleyball floated her boat.
The film has a lot of adult content, hence the 15A cert, but its message is as old-fashioned as anything Preston Sturges or Frank Capra might have cooked up in the forties, i.e. the success of a marriage depends not on being free of problems but rather learning how to navigate them.
Tess says in one scene, “Let’s be unhappy together!” This is the best line I’ve heard since Sherry Turkle’s “Let’s be alone together.”
It’s directed in freeform fashion, playing out like a kind of ‘continuous present’ docu-drama where Alex is doing ‘improv’ both offstage and on. There’s an occasionally cloying soundtrack, its drum-like rhythm leaning on the action like an accidental overdub.
Alex gets most of the facetime as he pilfers private details for fodder for his act. Tess’ aspirations to return to the glory days of her volleyball (albeit from the sidelines) is like the distaff answer to this – an attempt to recover a self that’s become lost in the marriage’s 12-year itch.
A photograph of her leaping for a shot, which doesn’t show her face, is Cooper’s clever way of telling us Alex never really saw her for who she was, just what she did.
And thereby hangs a tale.
