Best F(r)iends (Volume One)

2018 comedic thriller

Rating: 10/20 (Josh: either a 4/20 or a 10/20)

Plot: A homeless drifter befriends a mysterious mortician, and the two develop a business partnership involving the selling of gold teeth. Then, things get really confusing.

As Josh says, this is a hard one to rate. On the one hand, I don't think I've laughed this much in a movie theater in my entire life. If this is intended as a comedy, it's a complete success. The weird thing is that even with my experience appreciating bad movies, I'm still having a difficult time knowing whether I'm laughing at this movie or with this movie.

In fact, I'm not even sure it's possible to be with this movie. The plot, the characters, the little twists and turns, and the nuances are all so completely bizarre that it's hard to connect with anything that's going on. Supposedly, Sestero based this screenplay on real-life experiences with Tommy Wiseau and a road trip. It's doubtful that the experience actually involved any teeth, a mysterious ATM machine, the tragic death of an entire clown family, or creepy masks. Sestero is clearly covering up the reality in mounds of metaphor, and somebody with any background on Sestero and Wiseau's relationship--like, somebody who's read Sestero's book The Disaster Artist was adapted from--will see some parallels. The problem--and I don't want Greg Sestero to read this because I don't want to hurt his feelings--is that he's just not enough of a writer to pull this sort of art-house flick steeped in metaphor and symbolism off.

It's easy to find bad movies where the director failed at horror or failed at comedy or failed at drama. My favorite bad movies are the results of writers/directors who are absolutely full of themselves. I'm not accusing anybody who helped make this as being full of themselves, but it's clearly an attempt at an artsy, Lynchian sort of movie. And to see something like that fail so spectacularly is a unique opportunity.

Here's what I expected going into this project. I knew that Sestero had written it, and I knew he had written it with the specific purpose of giving his friend Wiseau a part that would be perfect for him. After seeing previews, I really did think it might succeed as an artsy kind of film, the kind of thing where the natural oddness of Wiseau could be used in completely unnerving ways. Josh and I both thought that with the right direction, Wiseau maybe could not be so bad. He could be a fringe character in a David Lynch movie, the kind who pops in to one scene and talks about how it's hard for him to find pants that fit because his legs are two different lengths and that there's always a frog in one of the pockets and then is never heard from again.

This shattered those expectations. Tommy Wiseau is a fucking force that is impossible to ground. You just can't control Tommy Wiseau, and if he wants to wear high-heeled boots that he can barely walk in or pretend to lick a car or improvise lines or sing random lines or mess up a line and quickly correct himself, there's just no point in stopping the guy. His character looks ridiculous, sounds ridiculous, and is ridiculous. No character like Wiseau's Harvey actually exists on this planet even though the character clearly tells another that he is from planet Earth at one point. But you know what? Before I saw The Room, I didn't know there was a person like Tommy Wiseau either. And he singlehandedly takes something that would nearly be unwatchable with an absolutely oppressive soundtrack, pretentious editing with incoherent montages, and a narrative that doesn't make a lick of sense into something that is enormously entertaining. You just can't take your eyes off the guy when he's on the screen. Every bit of dialogue. Every movement. Every scene when he gets to display his athletic prowess (in this film, it's basketball). Every flubbed line. Every exaggerated gesture. Every laugh. Just everything the guy does here is completely magical.

Is he good? No! If Sestero wanted to write him a character that would be perfect for him, he failed. He wrote him a character that Wiseau is going to play exactly like he would play every other character he gets the opportunity to play--ineptly. He clearly can't remember his lines. He doesn't understand the character's motivations. He doesn't understand how one actually interacts with another human being. He's hilariously awful! But I'm pretty sure anything else would have been a disappointment.

Sestero isn't much better. For the first twenty minutes of the movie, I thought he was a mute, and I didn't think he would have handled that nearly as well as Sally Hawkins. There are times when he and Wiseau have some chemistry, the kind of chemistry that I don't think Wiseau could have with anybody else, but there are other times when even Sestero seems befuddled by what his friend is doing in these scenes. And the other actors and actresses seem even more lost in scenes they have with Wiseau. In a way, it makes things even more uncomfortable.

There are a few nods to The Room (like that aforementioned basketball scene) in this that might have been a little too obvious. I did appreciate how weird this movie was willing to be. I mean, that clown family. A very strange trailer for Volume Two (which comes out in June) was shown after this (along with about 20 minutes of other bonus footage including a music video) that makes it seem like it might be even stranger than this first installment.

So if this is a comedy, it might be a resounding success. If it's a straight thriller, it's a laughable failure. Whatever it was, I was about as entertained as I've ever been in a movie theater. And I can't wait for Volume Two!

I got to see this with my fiend Josh.