London Film Festival 2012: The Comedian

rating: 2.5

Tom Shkolnik's debut feature starts strong but soon enough founders under the weight of its own improvised method. Ed (Edward Hogg) is a dispassionate office drone working in a soul-destroying call center, while fashioning a career as a stand-up comic on the side. However, Ed soon enough comes to realise that he actually might not be that funny, and like many of us, inevitably has to temper his dreams against the crushing pain of reality. A brutal opening scene in which we observe him flopping on stage electrifies the film with nervous energy and promise; the audience laughs at rather than with Ed, while post-gig, the MC offers refunds to anyone who didn't like him. His only solace is a conversation on a bus with Nathan (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), a kindly young man who attended the gig and provides him with an honest but fair appraisal of his work. The two bond, and quickly become lovers, one of the film's few convincing tenets, owing to strong chemistry between the two. At this point, the story branches off from its opening riff on job dissatisfaction, shifting the focus to drunken nights out and romantic liaisons - specifically Ed's wavering affection for his female flatmate Elisa (Elisa Lasowski) - effectively jettisoning its most curious and unique aspect of all; one man's unfortunate realisation of the futility of his career and life path. Shkolnik's naturalistic approach - largely achieved through improvisation workshops - unquestionably makes the small tics of dialogue feel real, yet the inherent problem is that the stifled cadences and distended dialogues, authentic though they are, just don't make for particularly compelling or urgent drama. The spare approach makes a slog of its scarcely 80-minute runtime, and never are we convinced that there's enough dramatic substance to sustain even such a brief length. The prevailing feeling is that it would have been more successful as a short. The fat to be trimmed is readily apparent throughout; an argument on a bus with some ignorant louts, while no doubt well acted, seems overly keen to examine base gay politics, when previous scenes had already taken them as a given. Simply, The Comedian is a fatally underwritten curio that doesn't give its competent actors enough to work with.