Fourth of July Review: Louis C.K.’s Comedy Fruitlessly Looks for Catharsis

Louis C.K.’s Fourth of July appears to be torn between honoring the personal ambitions of its creators and playing by the rules of formula. On paper, the film sounds quite ordinary, like another dramedy about a neurotic artist attempting to come to terms with his family. Take a pinch of Woody Allen, and add to the recipe the work of every Allen imitator to make any kind of impression on American indie cinema in the last 30 years, and you’re closer than you probably should be to capturing the spirit of Fourth of July.

While C.K. was riding the creative high of the television shows Louie and Horace and Pete, one didn’t anticipate in the comedian’s future a movie that might invite comparisons to, say, an Edward Burns production. After accusations of sexual harassment (which he admitted to committing) stalled his career, C.K. seems determined here to “play nice” and make something ingratiating. Yet, in the cracks of certain scenes, you see an artist peek through.

Joe List, a comedian who’s opened for C.K. on stage, and who co-wrote Fourth of July, plays Jeff, a New York jazz pianist recovering from alcoholism. List himself has been in recovery since 2012, and he and C.K. imbue the film’s first act with a jittery sense of irresolution that’s true of newfound sobriety and reminiscent of the livewire comedy of C.K.’s past triumphs.

Fourth of July’s scenes are jagged, never quite reaching their anticipated destinations. Jeff, on the wagon for about three years, is talked into serving as a sponsor for Bobby (Robert Kelly). At Jeff’s apartment, Bobby appears to be on the verge of a confession, about how his weight and drinking problems coalesce with his family history, until Jeff’s wife, Beth (Sarah Tollemache), walks in and inadvertently crushes his momentum. The casualness with which Bobby’s potential catharsis fades into the ether of everyday banality is very truthful and funny.

In the film’s best moments, C.K. seems to be aiming for a more commercially palatable John Cassavetes movie: something loose and revealing that still keeps us grounded in familiar story beats. When Jeff is playing a set at a bar, C.K. lingers on the show, letting us drink in the textures of the setting. We’re allowed to realize for ourselves that Jeff has to spin a cocoon, one that includes only himself and his instrument, in order to feel safe in a bar from relapsing.

As a performer, List has an understatement that’s rare for comedians riffing on themselves. He doesn’t hammer the pathos of his presence into the ground or act cute to court audience sympathy. You have to come to him a bit, which is becoming of a new and raw actor. And List somehow positions his glasses, large and owl-shaped, as a symbol of self-loathing. Throughout, they make his eyes look as if they’re perpetually drooping in resignation.

What C.K. doesn’t do in Fourth of July, which positions it in stark contrast to much of his prior work, is evince a willingness to risk breaking the entire production open so as to mine something truly, uncomfortably personal. Cassavetes did this sort of thing all the time: Husbands, one of the supreme cinematic masterworks concerned with machismo and alcoholism, spends a half hour of its running time in a bathroom with drunk men recriminating one another. In such a moment, you feel the filmmaker’s will to risk losing his audience, and even himself, so as to channel the depths of his mania.

C.K. displayed similar tendencies in Louie, Horace and Pete, and, most audaciously, in his prior film, I Love You, Daddy, which appears to be in direct conversation with his sexual dysfunctions. It’s a shrill, sleazy movie that’s less likable than Fourth of July yet more memorable—a personal work that you can somehow hate and respect in equal measure.

It’s a shame that C.K. and List don’t stick with Jeff and Bobby and their adventures concerning Bobby’s newfound sobriety, because the film’s deviation from this setup, and from Jeff’s bitchy sessions with his therapist (C.K.), is profoundly disappointing. Jeff eventually goes to Maine for the traditional vacation with his family during the week preceding the Fourth of July to make the declarations that he’s been promising to make for years: that he resents them and wishes to air his laundry so that he might be comfortable with fatherhood.

Many men in real life have such feelings, especially those in recovery, yet this setup feels pat and recycled from countless other things. This feeling isn’t alleviated by the fact that Jeff’s family is a collection of boisterous sitcom clichés prone to saying the wrong working-class thing at the wrong time—and, of course, they think Jeff’s obsession with feelings is girly.

Fourth of July has a scrappy, dashed-off quality that softens many of those clichés. The film barely has a second act and not much of a third, as Jeff’s week with his family seems to be ending just as he got there, in the process sparing us a lot of pop-film psychology. Jeff lashes out at his drunk and insensitive family, they take it in stride…and that’s about it.

Jeff’s issues, particularly with his parents (Paula Plum and Robert Walsh), are never defined, as we’re meant to accept this situation universally as reflective of The Baggage We Carry. These elisions deflate the film of the self-pity that’s often inherent to family dramas, and Jeff is held as accountable for his overall misery as anyone else. Yet C.K.’s glancing under-dramatization of this setup leaves one wondering why he and List bothered with it at all. Fourth of July is painless and occasionally spiky, yet you leave it still hungry for a movie. This is actually an audition reel: for C.K.’s redemption in the film business, and for List’s induction into it.