David Brent: Life On The Road (15.)
Directed by Ricky Gervais.
Starring Ricky Gervais, Doc Brown, Jo Hartley, Tom Bennett and Andrew Brooke. 96 mins.
Ricky Gervais is not a loveable figure, and even though I've enjoyed a lot of his work I don't have anything invested in his success. His whole comic persona is based on him being smug, successful beyond merit and punchably annoying. Maybe, just maybe, I'd be happy to see him fall flat on his face. His great redeeming feature though is having created and played one of the all time great sitcom characters. If he knows anything, he knows how to play David Brent, possibly to a painful degree. And here he's gone and risked it all by putting his TV comic creation on the big screen, a move that even when it works, never really works. (And after concluding the series so perfectly, too.) But, if he'd been lurking in the foyer afterwards I think I would've gone up to him and given him a hug and awkwardly fist pumped or some such silliness because he's gone and done it.
Putting a TV comic creation on the big screen is always a fraught process. Even very funny films like Alan Partridge or The Simpsons, seem underwhelming. Possibly only Borat and South Park have really excelled on the big screen. (I'd also say Tony Hancock in The Rebel.) This project is made that bit more challenging because he's doing it without the show's co-creator Stephen Merchant.
The film picks up Brent's story ten plus years on. The BBC 2 camera crew are back, to find that he's now a travelling sales rep for a cleaning products company who has decided to give rock stardom one last shot and is blowing all his savings, pensions and credit cards on paying for a tour with his old band Foregone Conclusion. Except none of the old band mates are available so he's hired a group of session musicians to play with him, alongside an aspiring young rapper (Brown.)
It is funny, guffaw out loud funny, all the way through. The self delusions, the fantastic awkwardness of his social interactions, the frantic digging of holes, are all still there and just as effortlessly funny as before. There's also the excruciatingly awful songs, and yet not so awful that his dreams of stardom aren't entirely ridiculous. That's the thing about Brent, he's almost believable. Like most classic comic creations he's an exaggerated version of its creator and while most performers try to put some distance between the two, Gervais seems to content to let the two of them overlap.
The pathos of Brent is therefore inherent, it doesn't need to be spelled out. But that, spoilers ahead, is what he does at the end of the film; and it works beautifully. A theme of the film is how society has got that bit nastier and crueller in the years since the TV series. It's a feature of a film that a lot of the other interviews with the supporting cast, (the band members, the people in the office) are quite direct in their contempt for him, in a way that Wernham Hogg people never were. It seems unnecessary but it pays off at the end. I think because the root of David Brent's appeal is that stuck inside this comic monster there seems to be a normal semi-decent person who can't quite bring himself to discard the fame delusion. He's so pitiable that even the simple action of someone buying him a drink is deeply moving. Just between you and me, and if it ever comes up again I’ll deny it, but I did shed a few tears in the end.
Directed by Ricky Gervais.
Starring Ricky Gervais, Doc Brown, Jo Hartley, Tom Bennett and Andrew Brooke. 96 mins.
Ricky Gervais is not a loveable figure, and even though I've enjoyed a lot of his work I don't have anything invested in his success. His whole comic persona is based on him being smug, successful beyond merit and punchably annoying. Maybe, just maybe, I'd be happy to see him fall flat on his face. His great redeeming feature though is having created and played one of the all time great sitcom characters. If he knows anything, he knows how to play David Brent, possibly to a painful degree. And here he's gone and risked it all by putting his TV comic creation on the big screen, a move that even when it works, never really works. (And after concluding the series so perfectly, too.) But, if he'd been lurking in the foyer afterwards I think I would've gone up to him and given him a hug and awkwardly fist pumped or some such silliness because he's gone and done it.
Putting a TV comic creation on the big screen is always a fraught process. Even very funny films like Alan Partridge or The Simpsons, seem underwhelming. Possibly only Borat and South Park have really excelled on the big screen. (I'd also say Tony Hancock in The Rebel.) This project is made that bit more challenging because he's doing it without the show's co-creator Stephen Merchant.
The film picks up Brent's story ten plus years on. The BBC 2 camera crew are back, to find that he's now a travelling sales rep for a cleaning products company who has decided to give rock stardom one last shot and is blowing all his savings, pensions and credit cards on paying for a tour with his old band Foregone Conclusion. Except none of the old band mates are available so he's hired a group of session musicians to play with him, alongside an aspiring young rapper (Brown.)
It is funny, guffaw out loud funny, all the way through. The self delusions, the fantastic awkwardness of his social interactions, the frantic digging of holes, are all still there and just as effortlessly funny as before. There's also the excruciatingly awful songs, and yet not so awful that his dreams of stardom aren't entirely ridiculous. That's the thing about Brent, he's almost believable. Like most classic comic creations he's an exaggerated version of its creator and while most performers try to put some distance between the two, Gervais seems to content to let the two of them overlap.
The pathos of Brent is therefore inherent, it doesn't need to be spelled out. But that, spoilers ahead, is what he does at the end of the film; and it works beautifully. A theme of the film is how society has got that bit nastier and crueller in the years since the TV series. It's a feature of a film that a lot of the other interviews with the supporting cast, (the band members, the people in the office) are quite direct in their contempt for him, in a way that Wernham Hogg people never were. It seems unnecessary but it pays off at the end. I think because the root of David Brent's appeal is that stuck inside this comic monster there seems to be a normal semi-decent person who can't quite bring himself to discard the fame delusion. He's so pitiable that even the simple action of someone buying him a drink is deeply moving. Just between you and me, and if it ever comes up again I’ll deny it, but I did shed a few tears in the end.
