Customer Reviews

Second Best

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I really enjoyed the movie. Here is this dysfunctional loser that reminds me a little of me, of my firends, there are very real feelings wrapped into this movie, he screws up, tests of friendship. I enjoyed the journey.

This fabulous out take in time is shot through with ripe language and the visual images they leave behind. Men are men and we all know that but this film shows the visceral vulnerability that the latter stages of life, bring to the table, when careers go bad and health fails.

A perfect encapsulation of life and especially men and their attitudes towards themselves, their buddies - and what remains of their worlds. It is a keeper of a film and never got the notice it definitely deserves.

Second Best is a five star - just trust me. It is painfully, but touchingly poignant and in a rarely seen way. If you don't like any of the above adjectives then move along. If you do - just trust me, it's well worth your time.

My grandmother, God rest her soul, used to tell it like it was. If you were losing your hair, she pointed it out. If you were putting on weight, she told you so. My moustache made me look short, and she told me so every time she saw me. Having no tolerance for the little lies people tell themselves and their loved ones to make life more bearable, she had no patience for the insistence of friends and relatives to the effect that their commonplace sons, daughters, grandchildren and/or siblings were talented. "If they had talent," she used to maintain, "they'd be making money." Without money as testimony, anything else one might do, according to Grandma, was just a knack. A parlor trick...a dime a dozen.

Watching the 2003 movie "Second Best," I could not help but think that Grandma's spirit had visited and provided inspiration, if not editorial assistance, to writer-director Eric Weber. Weber is merciless in the honesty he brings to the portrayal of a bunch of reluctantly self-admitted losers in a Bergen County, New Jersey that could have stood in for almost any neighborhood in New York, Chicago, Boston or Phillie. Life does indeed have its ups and downs; and these guys, whatever their ups might have once been, are now on a fairly steady diet of downs with little or no relief in sight. Making up this crew are Peter Gerety as Marshall, slowly dying and, more importantly, loosing his dignity to prostate cancer; Matthew Arkin as Gerry, a real estate salesman who is lucky to sell two houses a year; Bronson Pinchot as Doc, whose MD will never carry him any farther than the emergency room in a small, local hospital; and Joe Pantoliano as Elliot, their erstwhile leader, and self-appointed bard whose stock in trade is an on-going chronicle of what it means, what it REALLY means, to be a loser. This chronicle takes the form of self-published "columns" that Elliot produces on his PC in his spare time, of which he has more than enough since his NYC publishing career long ago tanked and he has since been reduced to subsisting on hand outs from his son, his fabulously successful (and fabulously remarried) ex-wife, and his mother, she none the worse for the wear for being in a nursing home. Day after day, Elliot hits the keyboard and unburdens himself of the awful truth that life, and whatever it once might have had to offer, have passed him by. His genius, however, is the fact that he takes it upon himself in these columns to speak for EVERYman (and EVERYwoman, too) in the complaint that life just isn't fair. While his musings are anonymous, he is accessible at a website, www.Secondbest.com. The e-mail starts coming in, from the MIT graduate who is too geeky to get a date; from the aging wife with the flirtatious husband; from the older, award-winning salesman who, after four successful decades on the job, is put out to pasture by his new 27 year old female boss. Each identifies with Elliot's tirades against fate, and each has a story to tell and a desire for someone to just listen. So Elliot listens.

As the story unfolds, however, we learn that the abject failure of these meager lives is not enough to satisfy Fate's cruel lust for pain. Nope...to top it all off Elliot, Marshall, Gerry, and Doc have a wildly successful friend, Boyd Gaines as Richard, who escaped the old neighborhood to become one of Hollywood's most famous producers....and he is coming home for a visit. Needless to say, the reunion is a dance of awkward deceit, whereby Richard tries his level best not to openly recognize how provincial and unsuccessful his best friends are, while they in turn try not to be consumed by the jealousy that is eating them alive throughout his visit. Thus, even as Elliot tries pathetically to interest Richard in a screenplay he wrote, Richard continually dodges the necessity of telling Elliot what he really thinks of the work.

As is par for this sort of movie (and, if Hollywood is to be believed, also par for gatherings of old friends whose lives have taken dramatically different turns) confessions of past sins and current resentments threaten to derail the entire thing. Elliot's columns, heretofore finding grist in life's generic inequities or in his friends' particular failures at marriage, career and life, come to a head when he turns his own guns on himself, and reads aloud a True Confessions self-examination that lets more than one cat out of the bag.

As the film draws to a close, Richard, having finally dismissed Elliot's screenplay as "not right," announces that he has instead found a treasure trove in Elliot's columns. Envisioning them being turned into a successful movie, he offers Elliot a job and even agrees to fly him back and forth from coast to coast as need be so that he can continue to visit his aging mother and the dying Marshall. At this point, standard Hollywood issue screenwriting would have had Elliot finally find fame and fortune, and finally achieve the affirmation that has escaped him his entire life. But Weber wisely eschews this tidy wrap-up and instead has Elliot turn down the offer, apparently having found peace in the fact that the offer was at least made.

The message here, for all my fellow baby-boomers whose lives somehow did not turn out as we planned, those of us who find ourselves suddenly vastly older than we ever imagined being, who find our careers cruelly ended, our marriages crumbling and our prospects incredibly bleak, is that EVERY life, no matter what its circumstances, IS worth something, and all it takes to regain one's dignity is to simply stand up and declare that YOU ARE SOMEBODY.

My grandmother would have had little sympathy for the plight of either Elliot or his friends. But even she would have had to applaud the fact that not one of these "losers" was willing to go down without a fight. For any non-millionaire of about 50 or more, this is a movie to see.

I did something with this movie I've never done before - I threw it in the trash. Yes, really. Bad language can't carry a mediocre story and depressing characters.

Low, low reseller prices should tell you something (several available for 1 cent). They just wanna make a little on the shipping.

Joe Pantoliano carries this film, playing the main character--a middle-aged, divorced, cynical guy whose failed marriage and boot from his high profile job as a tony NY City publishing house editor lands him in the middle of, from his point of view, Loserville.

While JP's acting is very strong, the thing going on here with the story is just a little too cringe-producing, just a little too trying-too-hard. It's as if the screenwriter really, really wants you to feel sorry for this guy--as well as his cronies, one of whom is played by the amazingly reappearing Bronson Pinchot (remember him?)--and this "really, really" element of it makes the movie not exactly difficult to watch, but a little bit too much to settle into the movie with.

The cronies include a doctor (Pinchot), a real estate guy, and another guy. Adding to the "loserness" is the appearance of Richard, a very wealthy Hollywood producer who's also one of the group, but obviously in a different class (even the doctor is not a rich guy). Richard shows up and stays at JP's place; JP has established a newsletter for losers, and among other things, this newsletter also serves to accentuate the somewhat cringe-producing element of the story.

On one hand, it's not hard to see why it would be easy to identify with people who don't get what they want, which is really the crux of the story. But on the other hand, the constant reminding of this inability to achieve one's dreams gets kind of tiring, as if somebody is nagging you hour after hour. Sure, we don't necessarily want to see a great Hollywood ending all the time--all the "losers" get what they really want, as if by magic--but realism like this needs higher stakes than is presented here in order to make this truly compelling.

The stakes presented here are not as high as they should be. One guy wants to get laid--OK, fair enough, but not really as compelling as it should be. Another guy (JP) wants an emotional connection, now missing after the failure of his marriage, and when he initially connects with a sexy housewife--Jennifer Tilly, doing a great job--he thinks maybe he has that, but then it's obvious, later, that he really doesn't at all.

In a way, this is a hard movie to review because all these middle-aged men ARE getting older; they are losing the energy and virility they had; they ARE, in one way or another, worse off than they were before. So there is an element of sympathy that definitely comes through. But the problem is that we don't really FEEL that from them. The way the parts are written, these guys kvetch, yes, but the vast majority of the time, they don't really SHOW us that these things are hitting them as hard as we think they REALLY are hitting them.

So this lack of expression of feeling definitely hampers the movie and that's what keeps it from being more than a 3-star film. If there had been more real genuine expression of how these guys actually FEEL--how much this middle age really hit them--this would have been a much better piece of work. Only very rarely do we get that--much too rarely, in fact.

Not bad...but definitely not what it could and should have been.