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The Baxter
The
thrust of Showalter’s film is to give this archetype of
the romantic comedy his own story, an alternative rendering that
is intriguing on the surface, until we remember that Baxters are
not underdogs. In movies, they are overshadowed and left behind
because they are privileged and dull. And because Elliot—a
tax accountant who attended Ivy League schools, loves numbers
and claims Monday is his favorite day—is no exception to
this construct, Showalter resigns to accentuating Elliot’s
defects rather than warming us to his eccentricities or exploring
the pathos of his circumstance——Elliot believes it
is his fate to remain a Baxter for life. Unlike the more familiar
movie nerd, Elliot can attract a girl. His affliction is that
he ultimately loses every one of them to another man at untimely
moments. This
affliction is why Showalter’s script virtually tosses two
young women into Elliot’s lap early in the film. Office
temp Cecil Mills (Michelle Williams) and magazine editor Caroline
Swann (Elizabeth Banks) conveniently arrive at Elliot’s
New York office within minutes of each other and immediately make
an impression on him. Elliot initially has his eyes set on Cecil,
who has just moved from Minnesota with secret ambitions of being
a singer. It turns out that Elliot and Cecil have some mutual
interests, including an affection for the dictionary (Elliot refers
to the "G" section as a classic). But the more sophisticated
Caroline steals Elliot’s attention when she enters the picture.
That Elliot and Caroline think they have even more in common is
part of the joke, and soon enough they are planning a wedding. Up
until this point, Elliot seemingly can do no wrong. Like a grown-up
Eddie Haskell, he knows all the right things to say while visiting
Caroline’s parents, who also have been won over by him.
In a moment of unsightly self-satisfaction, Elliot smugly boasts
to Caroline’s mother how he and the bride-to-be keep no
secrets from each other, just before he discovers Caroline’s
high school sweetheart Bradley in a photo album. Caroline has
never mentioned Bradley to Elliot, which sends Elliot tailspinning
into suspicion and self-doubt. When
Elliot confronts Caroline about her man from the past, she brushes
it off. But in one of the movie’s funnier moments, Bradley
(Justin Theroux) suddenly appears after Caroline assures Elliot
that it would take on act of God for her to cross paths with Bradley
again. As it happens, Bradley is a millionaire scientist who travels
the globe yet also spares some of his valuable time for the elderly,
to bask in their wisdom. Elliot senses he is overmatched by Bradley,
and in his anxiety, bares his soul to Cecil, who offers him a
sympathetic ear. From there a series of follies and misunderstandings
jeopardize Elliot and Caroline’s wedding. Since
the twist of The Baxter centers not on whether Elliot
will win the girl’s heart, but whether he’ll lose
her, Showalter deprives us of moments that might endear us to
Elliot as he tries to prove his love. Where empathy or self-affirmation
might be needed, Showalter instead writes in an array of odd characters
to make light of Elliot’s despair, and these scenes exploit
the reasons why we should worry that he will be dumped. When provoked,
Elliot whines in a shrill voice and crinkles his nose to accentuate
his beady eyes. He also bobs his head like a chicken, and eerily
begins to resemble ESPN’s Mel Kiper toward the end of the
film. In
a throwback to the older films that inspired The Baxter,
it’s somewhat charming how Elliot and Cecil address each
other as Mr. Spencer and Miss Mills. But there is little spark
between Showalter and Williams (Dawson’s Creek),
and even less between him and Banks (The 40-Year-Old Virgin).
Perhaps the most romantically comedic scene lasts only a couple
seconds, when Elliot fetches Cecil a pair of pajamas after a long
night of commiserating. The sight of him sprinting down his hallway,
securing a stack of flannels with two hands, is just the touch
of nuance that The Baxter otherwise desperately lacks.
The
rest of the film is caricature upon caricature. Williams is the
most grounded as the demure Cecil, but she can’t play it
too cogently because, for comedic purposes, she’s a singer
handicapped with stage fright. At first, Theroux (Mulholland
Drive) gives things a boost as the emotionally erratic Bradley,
but he remains too wound up to be a proper foil to Showalter’s
Elliot. Peter Dinklage (Living in Oblivion, The Station Agent),
who has marvelously broken out of niche roles, here is reduced
to another stereotype as a gay wedding planner named Benson Hedges.
Michael Ian Black earns some laughs as an offbeat neighbor, but
his character is almost entirely irrelevant to the events unfolding.
The same can be said for Paul Rudd as Cecil’s goofy boyfriend
Dan. It’s strange how The Baxter is being released
on the heels of The 40-Year-Old Virgin; as if the two
films didn’t share enough already, Banks and Rudd appear
in both. The
Baxter was photographed by Tim Orr, who has done splendid
work with David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls), but
here he seems to have little interest in adding a complementary
flair to the New York-Brooklyn setting. The romantic comedies
of the ‘30s and ‘40s employed stage design and blocking
to great comedic effect, but when The Baxter’s
pinnacle moment of slapstick occurs in Elliot’s apartment,
the camera is handheld and shaky, and the actors have little room
to maneuver. In
all, The Baxter is a mess. Showalter wanted to make a
sweet movie that bypassed the easy shock and gross-out laughs
that have become a staple of romantic comedies ever since the
Farrellys got hold of the genre. But with its nonlinear script,
sitcom style exterior setups and ironic fringe characters, The
Baxter is too aimless to evoke classic Hollywood. In
fact, an even more fragmented narrative might have served the
film better, if only to offset its predictability. There is a
sparingly used flashback technique in The Baxter that
jolts the proceedings to a freeze-framed halt before filling in
intentional plot holes. It’s a nice effect that could have
been employed more often to break up the tedium. The Baxter’s
best sequence occurs when Elliot recounts the chronological history
of his Baxter-hood to Cecil in an elevator. The flashbacks are
cued with the opening and closing of the doors, which results
in a quick series of humorous cuts on punchline. Inside, Elliot
and Cecil make for an anachronistic pair, he looking like John
Cleese's take on Sherlock Holmes, and she like Mary Tyler Moore
circa 1970. The
Baxter is unapologetically a pastiche. But in trying tell
an untold story, Showalter sadly has given us something we’ve
seen countless times before. (www.ifcfilms.com
/ www.thebaxtermovie.com) 4 Blips out of 10 By Chris Tinkham
Under
the Radar Film Review Rating Guide
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