Review: The Grand

Did Zak Penn’s The Grand, an improvisational comedy set in the world of poker, cast itself? Woody Harrelson, Cheryl Hines, Chris Parnell, Ray Romano, Dennis Farina, Michael McKean, among others, appear as if expected (the only one missing from the roll call is David Cross—no, wait, there he is!), and befitting similar such comic experiments, it’s a largely hit-and-miss affair. Even when the jokes fall to the floor like errant darts, they never feel desperate or embarrassing: In a throwaway scene, Brett Ratner appears as a poker player sporting a yarmulke, but Penn understands that his friend has less aptitude as an actor than he has as a filmmaker, and so he cannily writes the super-hack’s bad performance as bad bluffing. The ostensibly unrehearsed card-playing scenes are as dull as the litany of on-screen transitional graphics, but the behind-the-scenes glimpses of the characters’ private lives are often funny, and as the six gambling-circuit types sparring for the titular prize at the Lucky Rabbits Foot Casino in Las Vegas, the actors more or less play to their strengths. To his doting mother (Estelle Harris), the hyper-sensitive germ freak played by Parnell says, “If I were a food critic, I would give your cooking five stars—five stars that have each collapsed into a black hole and merged to form the largest black hole in the universe.” That line alone earns The Grand two notches on our four-star scale, and the ghetto-fab entrance by Werner Herzog guarantees the film a passing grade. “Most people drink coffee, but I think it is some sort of beverage of the cowards,” says Herzog’s The German, a vicious, globe-trotting animal killer and card shark who considers geese “troublesome animals” and correctly thumbs his nose at Vegas for its lack of irony. In front or behind the camera, regardless of whose film it is, Herzog is still The Man, and when his character starts cussing up a storm in untranslated German, Parnell’s Harold responds, the only way he can, with a series of high-pitched squeals—an improvisational moment of grace, straight from the gut, that evokes not only the terror and desperation of the character but the audience’s as well.