New Suit
With Jordan Bridges, Marisa Coughlan, Heather Donahue, Dan Hedaya, Mark Setlock, Benito Martinez, Charles Rocket, and Paul McCrane.
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It’s an obvious premise, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Francois Velle directs this farce without any of the glibness that scriptwriter Craig Sherman is attacking. The characters are all recognizable studio types, and some of them are quite funny. Paul McCrane is especially good at underplaying an uptight studio chief whose name, Braggy Shoot, seems to invite overkill, and Heather Donahue, as one of Hansau’s assistants, has a touching scene in which she responds to one of her boss’s tirades by collapsing in front of a refrigerator and devouring someone else’s sandwich. As Dave Kehr points out in the New York Times, Velle also manages to soften the implied harshness of Sherman’s script by making the characters enjoyable in their own right, independent of the plot: “Though the script gives us every reason to believe that Kevin despises Marianne, the two are shown forming a jolly, piratical friendship as they plan to defraud and humiliate the abusive Hansau.” More generally, the story is compelling not because it’s believable in any literal sense, but because it delivers a general truth about Hollywood and about this country.
Schulberg was more interested in how pictures got made than in how deals got brokered. But if a picture named “New Suit” gets made in this movie we never find out–and it doesn’t matter much. The biggest difference between Schulberg’s story and Sherman’s isn’t just that in 60 years Hollywood has shifted from a producer’s playground to an agent’s business. It’s that New Suit is most interesting not for its literal story but for its subtext–namely the way that energy and emotion can become centered on a void.
