Dummy, el muñeco

Dummy (2002)

A fun, offbeat, somewhat frivolous charcoal gray comedy. It's hilarious in spots and touching in spots, and has some terrific acting. The overall scenario is a situation comedy, drawn out over the hour and a half, and it might have made a tighter hour long television show. At times it seems to really hit an eccentric tone that's terrific and even a little surreal, as with some of the family interactions, played with beautiful deadpan steadiness. And when it's a moving romantic comedy, you appreciate the restrained, sympathetic acting of several of the leads. There isn't a bad performance in the lot of them.

Adrien Brody , Milla Jovovich, and Illeana Douglas are all hilarious in this great little comedy... Beautiful Milla shows her unique talent for being simultaneously really sexy and really funny, as she did 5 yrs earlier, in "The Fifth Element"... What I like most is that the humour is mainly subtle. The funniest bits are more understated than they are in the bigger-budget comedies with the in-your-face – appeal to the broadest possible audience stuff... "Dummy" is a fine example of not compromising, in order to harvest the biggest-possible box-office receipts. I give this side-splitting indie 8 big-ones and whole-heartedly recommend it.

Steven (Adrien Brody), nearly 30 and living with his parents, sees an old Edgar Bergen movie on TV and decides to fulfill his longtime dream of becoming a ventriloquist. His beautiful unemployment counselor Lorena (Vera Farmiga) finds him work, but puts out a restraining order on him when he paints a thank-you note on her door. Later, this young mother agrees to date him anyway, but finds his bickering family, and his inexperience with women, daunting to a relationship. Steven's sister Heidi (Illeana Douglas) is a wedding planner with a drunken ex-fiancé who keeps showing up at the door. His friend Fangora (Milla Jovavich) is a pseudo-punk rocker whose sex does not prevent her from giving him terrible advice about women. The wedding of a Jewish girl, who wants Klezmer music and gets something unexpected, will become a turning point in everyone's lives.

Whoa, this is bad. Greg Pritikin directs his own script, about a tenth of which is funny. The rest strains hard to give us quirky characters, wacky situations and unexpected plot twists; but we can't buy any of it. The movie becomes unrecoverable when Lorena changes her mind about the restraining order and agrees to date Steven—after he mails her a videotaped apology featuring himself and his dummy. The message on her door disturbed her, but the tape charmed her? I could almost hear Vera Farmiga's brain going "ZZZZZT!" as she tried to play this character. Their relationship grows into the least believable nerd-with-beautiful-girl scenario I've ever seen.

The performances are varied. Adrien Brody recovers fairly well from playing such a pointless character. Farmiga is charming, especially considering the impossibility of her job. Jovavich, with her affected Jersey accent, never quite seems to inhabit her character. Illeana Douglas, a good actress, does a lousy job here. She doesn't seem to get what she's doing, and we can hardly blame her.

This is part of a sub-genre in comedy that I dislike: one that blurs the distinction between celebrating and belittling the losers it depicts. "Napoleon Dynamite," "Waiting for Guffman" and documentaries like "American Movie" and "Gates of Heaven" all belong in this dubious category. But "Dummy" is much worse. It's as phony as it is condescending.

This movie is terrific. It's very funny and very powerful. Everything that happens is a necessary plot point to tell the story. Nothing is extraneous. Each character is uniquely entertaining and real, they each remind us of someone we know. We root for Stephen, we dislike Heidi, and we can't help but love Fanny. The characters are developed wonderfully. The performances are all terrific. I've never seen any of Adrien Brody's work before, but if it's all as great as this then he's destined for super stardom. Illeana Douglas is hilarious and perfect as usual. I was most blown away by Milla Jovovich. She's amazingly fun to watch on screen and her New Jersey accent is dead-on. Great dialog and flawless directing. Simply put it's a wonderful film with a unique theme, which is unique in itself.

Adrien Brody is quietly wonderful as an unemployed nebbish in his late twenties who stills lives with his parents and has a fascination with ventriloquism; he finally buys a dummy of his own and practices the craft he's dreamed about, yet also realizes (via his new wooden companion) that it may be time to start growing up. Greg Pritikin wrote and directed this low-budget satire of suburban craziness, and seems to harbor an affection for bughouse characters all living on the edge. It isn't an original vision (Hal Hartley was mining this dryly eccentric territory 10 years ago), but it's still surprising how successfully Pritikin manages to pull this intentionally bumpy story together. Milla Jovovich is initially off-putting playing Brody's friend, a foul-mouthed garage rocker, but when she gets her band a job playing klesmer songs at a wedding--and immerses herself in the Jewish language--she reveals an appealing, sassy side that totally fits into Pritikin's offbeat universe. Illeana Douglas and Vera Farmiga are also very fine, and though the construction of the script is caricature-oriented, most of these actors overcome the slight material, revealing something unexpected in the process: a sunny story about weirdos that ultimately celebrates humanity. **1/2 from ****