Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is back in Utah covering the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, and the premieres are already flowing. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they are published, and check out our full archives of past editions.
At risk of shedding all of the so-few cool points I’ve accumulated in my years on this planet, I’m going to admit something you probably have already guessed: I, at one point, was a theater kid. It’s a time I look back on in my life fondly, if often accompanied by cringing when I think of the specific details – the English accent I mauled in a performance of Blood Brothers when I was at the tail end of my brilliant career is just one example of in a thousand errors – because of the friendships I made and the goofy art I got a chance to contribute to. You learn and live a lot (remember, a month or two in the life of an 11-year-old is a decent chunk of their lived experience at that point) in something like a summer camp, and though I never did an overnight in-the-middle-of-nowhere like the cast of Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s Theater Camp, I, like many who will probably seek this film out, recognized a whole host of very specific details that only could have emerged from one’s own experience. That, after all, can be easily gleaned from the way the film starts: a collection of real home movies from the cast members’ childhoods, including one where Gordon (who also stars in the film) and her bestie Ben Platt (he of Dear Evan Hansen infamy) duet, sporting the kind of ’90s miniature-adult wear that is vaguely reminiscent of if the Bugsy Malone cast decided to do a season of Dallas. Though I’m not particularly into popular theater anymore (there’s a reason I review movies, after all) and I’m breaking plenty of cardinal rules of film journalism by giving you a biography you are certain to not really give a damn about, I’m doing so for a reason: I should be the target audience for this movie. Theater Camp is directly meant to evoke a sense of nostalgia for those lost glory days of joyous camaraderie and Phantom singalongs at the lunch table, but it’s surprisingly flat and, worse, not particularly funny.
After a brief and genuinely pretty funny prologue, in which Joan (a deeply underused Amy Sedaris), the owner and operator of AdirondACTS – a sleepaway summer camp that serves as our setting – suffers a seizure from the strobe lights used during a production of Bye Bye Birdie and winds up in a coma, the problems begin to emerge as if they were trying to hit their mark for the spotlight. Theater Camp is a mockumentary that attempts to directly parody the kind of kids-shooting-for-their-dreams fluff like Spellbound that Sundance often programs. One might have assumed that it would have focused on the kids, given that their arcs are, you know, compelling. But Gordon and Lieberman see the plight of the counselors and Joan’s son Troy, a business-influencer type played by American Vandal’s Jimmy Tatro, as they attempt to hold the whole enterprise together in Joan’s absence.
The camp’s weeks away from defaulting on its mortgage, and Troy’s been drafted to try and save the whole thing from total collapse. He’s a moron when it comes to both matters of theater and business, but lurking under the shutter-shades douchebaggery lies a pretty decent heart, and few, if any of the councilors see that. Though there are a few of them, the two key players are Amos (Platt) and Rebecca-Diane (Gordon), a pair of songwriting and directing partners who once were the stars of AdirondACTS in their glory days and now have settled for teaching about theater after years of toil and anonymity. They craft an original production each year – this year’s is focused on bringing Joan’s history to the stage in a pithily-titled musical entitled Joan, Still – and the film “documents” both Troy’s attempts to save (or sell) the camp, and the production process for the pair’s musical.
Theater Camp‘s style is so reminiscent of television mockumentaries that one might assume it was a proof-of-concept pilot, but you’d be wrong (Gordon and Lieberman made a short film of the same name several years ago as a way to get here) and, like The Office-adjacent subgenre of sitcom, the film often forgets its ambitions in favor of traditional staging and editing. That, coupled with the film’s very mild sense of humor – seemingly pitched at acquiring an easy PG-13 so that it can be shown to actual camp attendees old enough to watch and are in need of having the idea that Camp Should Be Memorable bludgeoned into their skulls if they’re not having a good time – puts a pretty hard cap on the film’s ambitions and its potential. On the one hand, there’s some pretty impressive showmanship on display: the original songs are decent parodies of Broadway styling at the budget level, and one performer genuinely does stand out.
Noah Galvin, Platt’s real-life partner (and replacement in the stage version of Dear Evan Hansen), does a pretty swell job as the meek stage manager, who hides a serious amount of talent behind his blank and often-panicked visage. If anything in the film works as intended, it’s the third act shift in which those talents have to be put to proper use to try and save AdirondACTS from total devastation when a Bain Capital-like asset firm swoops in to add the land they’re on to another, richer summer camp that exists down the road. The actual production of Joan, Still that closes the film is full of an otherwise absent charm and would be a good conclusion to any similar “putting-on-a-show” film, but it comes after 80 minutes of Apatow-esque riffing from dull characters.
But what really sinks this is just how eminently irritating the entire adult cast is, and I say that as someone well-geared to appreciate the vagaries of failed ambition and who has several friends who are like (though more successful than) Amos and Rebecca-Diane. Gordon and Lieberman often seem to genuinely hate these characters, given that they’ve been stripped of almost any reasonable charisma, pathos, and the subsequent endearment that follows, but the film is just too nice to rake them across the coals for being pompous and self-righteous assholes, who lord their failed ambitions over the kids they’re looking to inspire. The kind of schadenfreude that generates humor, adds shading to the protagonists, and inspires some manner of empathy in the audience is almost totally absent. Instead, we’re treated to Platt and Gordon emotionally torturing a kid for the crime of… using a mentholated lip balm to make her cry on cue during a rehearsal and are somehow expected to feel sorry for them when they undergo a kind of break-up at the film’s climax.
There are plenty of films about ambitious or successful children who grew up to unable to realize those dreams or suspended in the amber of childhood (one thinks of the acerbic wit of something like Mystery Team and its darkness as an interesting counterpoint), but where Theater Camp differs is its inability to appropriately diagnose why those characters never quite made it or even semi-righteously praise their splendorous settling for just trying to do good works at a lower but just-as-fulfilling level. One longs for the charm and humor present in something like a Christopher Guest-like excoriation of its subjects here, but all Theater Camp can really do is just serve up heaping plates of pretensions buffoonery on the parts of its characters and hope that we can stomach enough of it to stay through the credits.