Jared's Pick - Movie Reviews: Kissing A Fool

Kissing A Fool

Watching this movie was like walking into a five star restaurant and ordering the cedar-smoked duck with cilantro-apricot glaze and a glass of fine wine, only to have it show up on a chipped plate with the feathers still on and bits of cork floating in the crystal goblet. This might have been a palatable film, but it is frittered away with shoddy presentation and a director who wants to cut everything up in small pieces and a screenwriter who wants to feed it to you like a two year old.

Jason Lee was a deadpan riot in the underrated Mallrats, and his sardonic delivery was the best thing about Chasing Amy; I hope the inevitable box-office slump of Kissing a Fool doesn't turn other directors off to his significant talents. He tries to make the sensitive, heartbroken writer Jay into a three-dimensional character and damn near succeeds, which alone is enough to prove his worth. He simply isn't given enough to work with, as the script is formulaic where it could be challenging and insulting where it could be merely weak. Even so, Lee manages to inject some real heart into his character.

David Schwimmer is another story. Given that I (and I assume the rest of America) can only see him as the soft-spined twerp Ross, I give him credit for trying the role of swinging lady killer Max Abbot, but wearing open throated V-neck T-shirts and saying "fuck" a lot doesn't hide the fact that he is obviously Acting.

Max and Jay are supposedly best friends, but their opposing personalities result in endless arguments - why are these guys even hanging out together? Jay introduces Max to his editor Samantha (played capably by Mili Avital), and the two fall in love. Except the insecure Max can't marry Samantha until he knows that she won't cheat on him, so he elicits Jay to try to seduce her as a test of her fidelity. Jay, being a sensitive guy (a fact that we are endlessly reminded of) refuses, but since he and Samantha work together he starts to fall in love anyway. Big Surprise.

The worst sin is the incredibly insulting way the story is told, through ridiculous flashback scenes. Kissing a Fool starts with a wedding, but we don't know who is getting married; the otherwise fine Bonnie Hunt is clearly uncomfortable in her role as Linda, the wedding host who tells an irrelevant, irritating couple how Jay, Max and Samantha came to be involved and where their tangled relationship led. These interjections by the hostess not only jar the flow of the story, but also show deep contempt for the audience's intelligence. Director Doug Ellin takes your hand and leads you through the story, being careful to have Linda point out the blatantly obvious and punctuate the "emotional" scenes with suitably stirring strings.

Despite this, the actors try their damnedest to wring some heart out of the pat script, and succeed more often than the laws of physics say they should. But I wouldn't go see Kissing a Fool for those few scenes. An occasional dash of spice doesn't make Cream of Wheat a gourmet dish - order something else.

- Jared O'Connor

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