The Extra Man

If you like films about life’s misfits or what Leonard Cohen called “beautiful losers”, then The Extra Man, if not all it could have been should amuse you. If, on the other hand such characters merely seem annoyingly sad it will be best to avoid it.

The movie, directed by Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman who directed  American Splendor (2003) about the chronic misfit and real life Robert Crumb protégé, Harvey Pekar, tells the story of Louis Ives (Paul Dano), a quietly awkward young man who loses his job as teacher at a New Jersey prep school after he is caught trying on one of his students’ bras. He moves to New York and specifically into the shabby Upper East Side apartment of Henry Harrison (Kevin Kline) a very minor playwright who ekes out a living squiring decrepit but wealthy women who are impressed with his affectedly upper-class style.  As Henry introduces the intrigued Louis to the profession of being an “extra  man”, Louis tentatively explores his cross-dressing tendencies and becomes smitten by a young woman (Katie Holmes), a colleague at an environmental magazine where he get a job.

Scripted by Jonathan Ames from his own novel in collaboration with the directors The Extra Man invokes echoes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age with Louis fancying himself as a modern day Nick Carraway, Henry with his imperiously urbane ways egging him on with his reports of high society, into which at best he gets to enter via the tradesman’s entrance.

If, no doubt one feels at least in part because of budgetary restrictions, the film is relatively light on depicting Henry’s antics as a paid-in-kind escort and thereby feels a little too inconsequential what does work is the interaction between the two leads. KIine is in his element with Henry’s charismatically self-centered high-handedness (one thinks of John Malkovich in Colour Me Kubrick 2005) whilst Dano is the perfect choice for the role as his diffident, sexually-unresolved flatmate.

Less successful is John C. Reilly as Henry’s downstairs neighbor. Oddly accoutered with a beard and flowing locks like a saddhu who’s been living in a cave for years and affecting a strangulated falsetto his character is simply distractingly incongruous.

If it needed to go further into the absurd to realize its full potential, as it stands, for lovers of oddball characters and their oddball ways The Extra Man has its charms

 

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