Better Than I Expected

The Upside.  A film by Neil Burger.  With Kevin Hart, Bryan Cranston, Nicole Kidman, Julianna Margulies.  ****

I went to this movie because I hadn’t been to the movies for a while, I was looking for something not too heavy, and I had seen the trailer any number of times, of Kevin Hart looking after a quadriplegic Bryan Cranston: it looked funny.  I thought it was one of those Black Man Shows a White Man How to Live movies.  Black Man Takes Depressed Wealthy White Man and Gives Him Reason for Hope.  The men seemed to have chemistry.  Hart looked hilarious.  (I didn’t realize it was a remake of an earlier French movie, The Intouchables, which was the most successful film in French history.)

In a way this was the movie I expected, but it’s also more complex and subtle.  The white quadraplegic, Phillip Lacasse (Cranston), is definitely depressed, but not just because of his disability.  He’s mostly depressed because his wife lost her life in the same hang gliding accident in which he lost his mobility, and he feels it was his fault.  He is extraordinarily wealthy, but his wealth seems almost incidental, an effect of his success at business.  He loves books and good music and art.  He is a cultivated sophisticated man who happens to be quadriplegic, and who blames himself for his wife’s death.  He lies in bed every night facing demons.

Dell Scott (Hart), the man who becomes his caretaker, is in many ways the more pathetic character.  He wasn’t seeking the job with Lacasse; he was just trying to get a signature to show his parole officer he was seeking employment.  He’s led a hard life in the projects of New York, but he has neglected his wife and son to the point where the son won’t speak to him and his wife throws him out.  His situation is desperate and certainly not all his fault, but he is the man who seems helpless as the movie opens.  He needs a break.

The series of job interviews that lead to Lacasse signing Scott, presided over by a prissily competent overseer named Yvonne Pendleton (Nicole Kidman), are a study in people trying too hard to impress somebody, sucking up to a rich man.  Scott doesn’t do that, mostly because he doesn’t know how.  The moment when Lacasse decides on him seems part whimsy, part human interest, part the choice of a man who doesn’t know whether he wants to live or die.  It’s in some ways the most intriguing moment in the film.  Something is going on in Lacasse’s mind, and Cranston lets us see that.

Some of what follows is pure comic effect: Scott taking a shower in a rich person’s shower stall that sprays at him in all directions; Scott treating Lacasse’s residual pain with a joint he has bought on the street, and their subsequent trip to a hot dog stand where Lacasse orders a dozen dogs.  Even Scott’s amazement at Lacasse’s collection of fancy cars: Lacasse wants to sell them all and travel in his specially equipped van, but Scott thinks the very impracticality of the cars is what is great about them, and it’s a trip to his son’s school with one of those cars that gets Scott back in the good graces of that young man, at least temporarily.  I personally thought the scene where Scott accompanied Lacasse to the opera was unbelievable and over the top: nobody lets a guy talk a lot and make a fool of himself at the opera, no matter what his background.  (And plenty of people love opera who aren’t from privileged backgrounds.  You never know who will be an opera lover.)

Lacasse has been carrying out an epistolary relationship with a woman named Lilly (Julianna Margulies) in nearby Buffalo (the scenes where Scott hears about this, and what epistolary means, are hilarious), and Scott can’t believe his boss doesn’t just call the woman up.  Get her on your cell right now.  He eventually persuades the man to do just that, and to actually meet the woman, and the scene where they do so, at a fancy restaurant in New York, is one of the most compelling in the movie.  Much happens during and after that scene that was a surprise to me (my wife saw a subplot among the women that I missed altogether).  This does wind up being one of the feel good movies of the year, but not in some facile way.  It faces a number of bumps along the way.

I can’t say enough about the acting, and the chemistry between the two men.  It’s no easy thing to make a quadriplegic subtle and interesting—all you have to work with is facial expressions—but Cranston makes Lacasse a full-blown interesting character, not just an object of pity or a temperamental rich guy.  And Kevin Hart, whom I hadn’t seen before, is an excellent actor, fully convincing in every aspect of his role, first as a resentful ghetto guy who wants to change his life but doesn’t know how, then as a man who knows how to take advantage of what life serves up to him.  I know he’s under attack these days because of some past things he said in stand-up, which made him drop his role as an Oscar host.  But the man can act.

There are any number of things we have to ignore to enjoy this movie, in addition to Hart’s past as a homophobe: the vast difference in wealth and opportunity between the two men.  The fact that the Weinstein Company was its original developer producer (Malia Obama worked on it as an intern).  The fact that it is “based on a true story” and its protagonists “are friends to this day” even though the whole thing is based on a French movie, and the men didn’t live in New York.  The truth is that these two men never existed.

It’s a good movie nevertheless.  Its success is no surprise.

Why does every movie these days have to be based on a true story?