The directorial debut of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia‘s Charlie Day, Fool’s Paradise poses the question, seems initially to pose the question, where is the line between madness and creativity?
Unfortunately, it poses many other questions and without particular clarity, wit or insight.
Writer-director Day also stars, as a childlike mute who, dumped on a bus from a mental hospital, stumbles into a life of fame and fortune. Despite shades of Hal Ashby’s Being There1, Fool’s Paradise lacks the profundity, falling back on tired tropes and cheap gags.
Wandering the streets of Hollywood, our unnamed protagonist2, is picked up by an impatient movie producer (the late Ray Liotta), from whom he inadvertently acquires the name “Latte Pronto”. Latte, as he shall now be called, is a clumsy, wide-eyed naif, clearly influenced by Chaplin’s Tramp, but Day here lacks the same grace and imagination as either actor or director.
The script is similarly empty. When Pronto is cast as stand-in in place of a method actor (also Day) who refuses to leave his trailer, his affectless and inability to not look at the camera is mistaken for a new, avant-garde acting style and catapults him to stardom. It’s not an inherently new or interesting premise and Day fails to conjure much insight beyond, “Boy, isn’t the movie business weird and vacuous?”
Day has assembled an impressive roster of supporting actors – the aforementioned Liotta, Ken Jeong, Adrien Brody, Kate Beckinsale, Jason Sudeikis, Edie Falco, Common, John Malkovich – but there’s the definite sense of them doing him a favour. Liotta is angry, Jeong is hysterical (overwrought, as opposed to funny), Malkovich at least gets a malevolent monologue, but all they get to work with are a sequence of throwaway gags.
Or at least they feel like gags. Day frames sequences with significance, but then fails to fill the frame with anything meaningful. Someone talking about autoerotic asphyxiation while Brody, as a reckless movie star, is eating a banana has the shape of a joke but not the content.3
Similarly, any moments of pathos or insight – the actors warming up seems to recall children at play, Pronto’s preferring to sleep on a park bench suggests a genuine desire for a quiet life – are quickly subsumed, often by Jeong yelling. The film veers between silence and cacophony, but comedy never arises from the absurdity.
In fact, the film is so lacking in humour that it feels almost intentional, like Day has succeeded in creating an anti-comedy. It may well be reevaluated one day as a cult classic, but it’s hard to make the case for currently watching it.
Half pointless picaresque, half toothless satire, there’s little to treasure in Fool’s Paradise and even less to laugh at.
Signature Entertainment presents Fool’s Paradise on Digital Platforms from 28th August, 2023
- The film toys with the idea of exploring politics, but mercifully drops it.
- Though, like Being There’s Chance, he’s arguably too passive to truly be called such.
- I’d write out more of the gags, but it’s honestly a bit depressing.
