Fool’s Paradise Review: Charlie Day’s Moribund Hollywood Satire Shoots Fish in a Barrel

The film is a dreary series of disconnected scenes that take weak potshots at niche topics.

Fool’s Paradise
Photo: Roadside Attractions

Charlie Day is one of the most gifted comic actors of our time, but his talents are scarcely on display in Fool’s Paradise, his debut feature as a writer and director. The film stumbles out of the gate with its arduous setup: wannabe film publicist Lenny (Ken Jeong) casting about studio lots in search of a client. He lucks out when he happens to be on a set the day that a producer (Ray Liotta) brings in a homeless man (Day) recently discharged from a mental health facility as a stand-in for an uncooperative, “method” lead actor.

Despite being catatonically silent and incapable of understanding a single direction, the homeless man’s mere ability to stay in the frame qualifies him as a success. Lenny slides in after filming wraps to pitch his services, and a misconstrued outburst from Liotta’s producer character lands the unlikely new star played by Day the sobriquet “Latte Pronto.” This basic introduction is more complex than anything that follows, as Fool’s Paradise quickly settles into a rote send-up of Hollywood’s culture of excess and reflexive worship of fame.

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The film’s depiction of the uncomprehending Latte’s ascent up the ladder of stardom is clearly inspired by Being There, which also traded on the joke that in a milieu where everyone inanely prattles on, a fool who doesn’t fit in might still be heralded as a genius. But Day misjudges the humor of Hal Ashby’s classic, which worked because everyone around Peter Sellers’s Chauncey Gardiner assumes that his airy non sequiturs must have an underlying wisdom because only the most “deserving” people could exist in such rarefied social environs. Here, almost everyone can plainly see that Latte is a madman who has all the self-awareness of a trained animal, yet he’s still immediately embraced even by those consciously exploiting his disability.

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There’s potential in seeing Day and Jeong, both maximalist comedians, play sharply against expectation. Day typically portrays characters who begin scenes in a state of visible agitation and rapidly escalate into explosive rage, but here he’s literally mute with passivity, a neutral core around which the heightened personalities of showbiz orbit in a frenzy. Jeong, meanwhile, tends toward frantic mannerisms, all silly voices and vulgar improv, but Fool’s Paradise finds him putting a leash on himself: Lenny is a fast-talker desperate to ingratiate himself into Hollywood, and his jittery schmoozing has an uncharacteristically plausible grounding.

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But it’s precisely Day and Jeong’s relatively low energy that neuters the wild fare that Fool’s Paradise wishes to unfold across its 97-minute runtime. The juxtaposition of a fast-paced Hollywood’s vapidity and these men’s cluelessness doesn’t heighten the absurdity of the former, but rather results in a dreary series of disconnected scenes that take weak potshots at niche topics like the cynicism of talent agents and the proliferation of wellness cults.

Fool’s Paradise sprints past each of these targets, dealing glancing blows to subjects that have already been obliterated by decades’ worth of Tinseltown parodies. A last-act turn toward a mawkish moral about how all the glitz and flattery of showbiz isn’t worth the value of a single true friendship puts a final nail in the coffin for this moribund satire, inadvertently reinforcing the sense that the preceding 90 minutes were completely meaningless.

Score: 
 Cast: Charlie Day, Ken Jeong, Kate Beckinsale, Adrien Brody, Ray Liotta, Jason Sudeikis, Edie Falco, John Malkovich, Common, and Jillian Bell  Director: Charlie Day  Screenwriter: Charlie Day  Distributor: Roadside Attractions  Running Time: 97 min  Rating: R  Year: 2023  Buy: Video

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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