‘Entertainment’ (2015)

Rick Alverson’s “Entertainment” is a film that subverts all connotations surrounding its title, and rather than directly entertaining us, actually challenges us by inspiring these questions: “What is ‘entertainment,’ why do those who seek to entertain do so, and what do we, the ‘entertained,’ expect from our entertainers?”

“Entertainment” follows an aging comedian (Gregg Turkington) as he travels across the California desert, performing at seedy clubs and prisons, all the while making his way toward some big Hollywood gig, and perhaps an estranged daughter.

As the film progresses, the comedian struggles to communicate with others, both through his belligerent stage character (based on “Neil Hamburger,” a character that Turkington performs as in real life),  whose act is made up of subversive, carefully constructed hacky jokes of misogyny, homophobia and overall distaste, and in his life off-stage. That inability to communicate builds, driving the always restrained and subtly affecting story into increasingly surreal territory that paints the American Southwest as somewhat of a wasteland of washed up opportunity and spent talent.

When viewed shallowly, from a distance and with slightly squinted eyes, the very premise of Alverson’s film, which he co-wrote with Turkington and Heidecker, is not an unfamiliar one. The idea here is that Alverson and company are taking something we have seen before in more conventional films about aging entertainers, and deconstructing it in order to get a fuller grasp, not on the story arc itself exactly, but more on what about this kind of story makes sense in a naturalistic sort of way, one that is not blurred or sweetened saccharine by clean resolutions or sentimental revelations.

Consider one scene where, after a typically lousy show, the comedian tries to explain to his cousin, John (John C Reilly), how he doesn’t really have an audience anymore that “gets it.” Meanwhile, John clearly doesn’t get it either, and offers the comedian some advice, that he should just try to be less weird, and maybe more people will get it.

This is a funny scene, but it also plays realistically with these opposite character types while again subverting expectations of some kind of cathartic moment between them. In this scene and many others, we witness the breakdown of direct communication and sense that no one is really on the same level of understanding. The comedian calls his estranged daughter frequently throughout the film, and always ends up having to leave a message — unable to reach her, unable to reach his audience, unable to reach himself. There is a lot of humor, but none of it comes without a little bit of a sting. That’s the kind of film Alverson is interested in making.

“Entertainment” doesn’t contain a single disposable scene, or a scene out of place. It is refreshingly efficient in its storytelling, and proves Alverson to be one of the most focused, confident and uncompromising directors working today. He makes confrontational movies about confrontational people, and there’s something both unsettling and somehow completely brilliant and refreshing about his approach. Alverson previously made “The Comedy,” a staggeringly unflinching foray into an aging yuppie-hipster played by Tim Heidecker, whose boredom and apathetic amusement with playing pranks on strangers in and around Brooklyn leaves him somewhat of a shell of a man. “Entertainment” can be viewed as a companion piece to that.

Turkington as a truly strange and fascinating to watch as he re-interprets his own real-life character for the film, which has been digested and reinterpreted by Heidecker, Alverson and himself, and then switches it off and becomes the hollow shell of a man (à la Heidecker’s character in “The Comedy”). As he journeys forward, the comedian wanders through the desert in search of something intangible, and visits various tourist attractions, including an airplane graveyard full of hollowed out shells of once were magnificent machines, an oil field where the derricks continuously drill and drill without repose, and an old West ghost town, all of which are better at indicating what is going on with the comedian than he himself is able to express to others. It also could be that Alverson is poking fun at metaphors — that also would be the kind of film that he is interested in making.

“Entertainment” is one of the best pictures of the year.

★★★★ (out of 4)