Crazy Famous: Paul Jarrett

This piece was written and filed before the announcement of Audiences Everywhere's untimely demise. So I'm posting it here in its entirety.

Overview: A fame-seeking mental patient gets pulled into a clandestine plan to assassinate Osama Bin Laden…in 2017. Gravitas Ventures; 2017; Not Yet Rated; 78 minutes.

Smile for the Cameras: Paul Jarrett’s Crazy Famous opens with a scene of a mentally compromised young man stripping to his tighty-whities and gleefully trampolining over a fence into Camp David. It ends with a scene of the same mentally comprised young man gunning down a small army of Islamic terrorists in the woods alongside Dr. Phil in brownface. The first scene is played for laughs. The second is not. Great filmmaking can bridge the gap between outlandish tonal differences and hyper-violent absurdism. As I like to remind our readers, the Coen Brothers have spent their careers doing just that. But Crazy Famous lacks the necessary vision to make such films work. As such, Jarrett’s film stumbles about as confused and incoherent as the very mental patients it populates itself with.

This Ain’t the Salem State Hospital: At first Crazy Famous seems like an introspective character study of Bob Markus (Gregory Lay), a young man obsessed with becoming famous. Deliciously awkward scenes from his troubled youth reveal an oppressive upbringing by fame-crazed parents. His father tried to make him a sports star, his mother a child actor. He even had a disastrous stint as a competitive eater in high school. Somewhere along the way he figured out that fame and notoriety were the same thing, so he began a string of preposterous attention-grabbing stunts climaxing in the Camp David fiasco. After getting arrested, Bob’s shipped off to a mental institution where he falls in with an assorted gaggle of misfits and morons: Larry (Victor Cruz), a rage-junkie with a short temper, an eating disorder, and a laundry list of crippling neuroses like agoraphobia; “Dr. Phil” (David Neal Levin), a cheery fellow who believes he’s the eponymous television star and waddles around the psyche ward bestowing pop-psychology drivel; a suicidal young woman so inconsequential I’m not even sure she has a name who spouts off bizarre bon mots like a disaffected middle schooler going through her goth phase. (When she learns Bob’s name she replies “You’re a palindrome? Talk about karma.” Wait, what?); Mr. Smith (Richard Short), a nervous conspiracy theorist who believes the CIA is lying about Bin Laden’s death and personally knows his actual location. Spoiler alert: he’s right, he’s been institutionalized by other agents, and he organizes a break-out with the other inmates—except for the suicidal woman—so they can hunt Bin Laden down. Who of course now lives in a log cabin in…I’m gonna guess the Appalachian Mountains or the Adirondacks.

From there the film decays from character study to unfocused procession of comedic set-pieces and poorly executed action scenes. Mr Smith gets tortured by CIA agents, Larry gets a face-full of Dr. Phil penis as they try to climb into the hospital’s air ducts, the gang robs a gun store, Dr. Phil gets painted brown so he can infiltrate Bin Laden’s base, a car chase gets resolved when Mr. Smith discovers the car he’s squirreled away for his escape has a James Bond oil-slick button. These scenes don’t flow together, but even worse the more you think about them the less they make sense. If Mr. Smith wants to kill Bin Laden, why wouldn’t he tell the CIA where he actually is? Why does robbing a gun store for a small army’s worth of firearms not result in the National Guard getting called on them? And what on earth is Bin Laden doing in the Appalachian/Adirondacks? The film has little interest in these obvious questions; it’s more interested in how its characters respond to them. However—with the exception of Levin’s turn as Dr. Phil, a character who’s so obliviously stupid he’s actually enjoyable—none of the other characters are interesting enough for us to want to follow them. Bob starts the film as a fascinating, damaged human being but by the end he’s been pushed to the periphery in favor of Mission Impossible shenanigans.

Closing: The more one thinks about Crazy Famous, the more frustrated one becomes at it. What was it trying to do? Was it trying to be a commentary on America’s obsession with fame? Was it trying to be a silly road-trip movie featuring mental patients? Was it trying to be an irreverent spy thriller? Perhaps Jarrett was trying to do all these things at once. And in doing so it becomes none of them. All we’re left with is a strange, nonsensical plot and mental patient minstrelsy.

Grade: D