Williams, Crystal can't save lethargic comedy

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): Robin Williams and Billy Crystal in a film called Fathers' Day? We'd probably march out right away to see Robin and Billy in Tweetie and Sylvester, for Pete's sake.

Better still, they seem wise in the ways of Hollywood. To hell with soul-searching. Look what it did to Jim Carrey, whose brief venture into surreal territory in Cable Guy turned him into an audience deterrent. No, Robin and Billy have been around long enough to know what supposedly works.

Forget convoluted high concepts. Just choose an existing feel- good comedy (French is preferable). Americanize it. Assemble a "dream team". Director Ivan Reitman, whose credits include Parenthood, Kindergarten Cop, Ghostbusters and Dave. Producer Joel Silver, of Lethal Weapon fame. Screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, from whose pens came Multiplicity and City Slickers. Then put Robin and Billy cheek-to-cheek on publicity flyers. And so gathers the family crowd.

Yes, Fathers' Day is a remake of the successful 1983 French comedy Les Comperes, which costarred Pierre Richard and Gerard Depardieu. Stiff lawyer Jack Lawrence (Billy Crystal) and manic depressive English teacher Dale Putley (Robin Williams) are told by their mutual ex-flame, Colette (Nastassja Kinski) that they may be the biological father of her 16-year-old runaway son, Scott (Charlie Hofheimer).

The two childless men accidentally meet and join forces in finding the boy each thinks is his son. Meanwhile, the boy's official father (Bruce Greenwood) is a control freak who has a hard time showing his love for his son.

Sure, Robin and Billy get to horse around as they plow the grounds of San Francisco, Sacramento and Reno. They are as different as night and day, but they like each other from the beginning.

Sure, there are laughs involved. As usual, Billy gets to stare hard, twitch his forehead, quench a mocking smile, shake his head. Robin gets to don outlandish garbs and do his trademark histrionics. He hyperventilates, does wacky accents, hates driving and flying, and is weepy and suicidal. In short, the whole she-bang.

Sure, they find the boy, lose him, find him again and lose him again. They berate each other, laugh at each other's follies, lick each other's wounds. The whole exercise, as it turns out, is absolutely pointless. But what matters is that they finally find the boy for good, return him in good form, and each is a cured and better person for it. It is another family-value, self- satisfied piece where everything turns peachy in the end.

But, more importantly, does it make men happier about their lives? Maybe, but then again, maybe not.

Lackluster

So far so good? Yes, except that pedigree and goodwill are not enough. Fathers' Day, to put it simply, is bland on every count. Okay, so slapstick comedy is not the place to be looking for depth and substance, but even the superficialities border on the inept. For much of the movie's 99-minute length, stabs at humor feel forced and insincere, jokes fall flat and everything lacks spirit and conviction.

There are some highlights, but they are too few and far between. There is one entertaining scene when Robin simulates meeting his long-lost "son" in front of the mirror. The scene when the boy's official father gets locked up in a portable toilet is admittedly funny. Billy's head-butting exercise also looks funky. But one cameo appearance by a megastar is more likely to stick in your mind than the rest of the movie.

Whither Reitman and his dream team? Reitman's comedies are known for their wit, warmth, energy, visual lyricism, and a soft but clear-eyed regard for life's inner workings. Yet here we can see poor Robin and Billy straining to generate chemistry, only to be defeated at every turn by stale dialog, limp pace, skimpy characterizations and a weak plot. Robin resorts to overacting, but he's long past his glory days. Billy reacts by underacting (which is better to watch), but ends up looking like Harry lite.

The rest of the cast is pretty much non-existent. Kinski's relegation to background prop recalls Nancy Travis' thankless role in Three Men and a Baby. Greenwood and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Seinfeld), who plays Jack's wife, are just as inconsequential. Hofheimer can go back to acting school.

Patented acting

It seems that there is more to successful comedy than simply pairing up two comic geniuses. Williams and Crystal are among the most talented actors working today, and each has created a distinctive persona that most people can relate to. They don't send heart rates into overdrive, but they give new meaning to the word misfit.

The Robin we love is the adorable, golden-hearted klutz. He needs only to stutter a bit and we become putty in his hands. The same goes for Billy. He needs only to do that thing with his eyes and his forehead, and suddenly he's the wittiest person on earth. We know all that cynicism is just a front and that deep down he cares.

But both actors have reached the pinnacle of their careers: Robin in a series of consistently entertaining movies that culminated in Mrs. Doubtfire, and Billy in When Harry Met Sally. Since then, they do not become the character, the character becomes them. Their acting becomes patented. They are hardly cast against type. And so Fathers' Day is less about Dale and Jack looking for their mutual son than it is about Robin Williams and Billy Crystal playing themselves.

Which is not to say that it is bad, of course. But even an inspired performance, let alone creativity that has run out of steam, would feel recycled after so many precedents. Every new outing is now a regression: worn-out, cliched, involuting.

But maybe it would have been better if Hollywood had stopped doing remakes of far superior French films. Maybe it would have been better if Fathers' Day had stuffed its script into the garbage can and left Robin and Billy to their own devices.