Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is back in Canada all week covering the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. We wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing coverage of TIFF 2023, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
Well, as I wrote in my TIFF preview, regardless if Poolman, Chris Pine’s directorial debut, was any good, it would be a pretty memorable occasion. And it was! It was memorable enough for half of the audience to decide that, at the halfway point, what they’d seen so far would stick with them for longer than they’d like, so they left, secure in the knowledge that they’d seen enough. It was memorable enough for those who remained to laugh and jeer in equal measure for the rest of the film’s runtime. Poolman even prompted some would-be comedians to toss out feeler lines to the crowd to see if they could steal away some of the attention from Pine and his stacked cast’s flailing antics on screen, with the bitter silence that followed reminding us all that just because you can belt out standards in the shower, it doesn’t mean you’re ready for the Broadway stage.
But even weirder than a TIFF press and industry screening turning into a RiffTrax comedy show without the supplemental laughter is the fact that Poolman isn’t poorly directed. Pine and his crew do a decent job with the on-screen realization of things: It’s competently edited, well-lit, shot pretty well, has solid production design, and features enough glimmers of good performances among the ensemble that emerge every now and then to remind you just how skilled all of these people really are. The problem is not with the cast – Annette Bening, Danny DeVito, Jennifer Jason Leigh, John Ortiz, Stephen Tobolowsky, and Pine himself could pull off good performances, even with the characters they’ve been given. The problem is with the script, which is just so mind-numbingly terrible that it’s astonishing that it made it anywhere past the development stage.
Then again, it’s not really that surprising. Who would say no to Chris Pine (credited as a co-writer) pitching a neo-noir comedy twist on Chinatown, especially when they’ve got those names attached and Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins in one of the producers’ chairs? In the streaming era, responsibility is an afterthought – sure, being responsible to your writers and actors is one thing (and good on Pine for sticking to his guns here and not coming to Toronto), but being responsible to your viewers is another, and that horse left the stable once people started counting a film as “watched” if they made it 45 seconds into it. Besides, even the C-tier services need content, and what better way to attract new viewers to, I don’t know, Peacock Ultra-Magnum (the menu is ribbed for your pleasure) than a new Chris Pine movie? It can’t be worse than Wonder Woman 1984, can it?
Poolman is.
Its story feels like someone watched the trailers for Inherent Vice and made it halfway through the Pynchon book’s Wikipedia page before they realized that their copy of Matthew McConaughy’s Surfer, Dude was already past due at the library. Pine plays DB, a local roustabout who lives in a camper van in front of a motel pool – of which the maintenance and cleaning of said pool is the slowly draining emotional nexus of his life – who regularly agitates in front of the LA City Council about preserving the slowly-vanishing heritage of Los Angeles. He has two main enemies, a property developer (Clancy Brown) and the Council’s chairman (Tobolowsky), who he assumes are in cahoots to try and wreck his neighborhood. His girlfriend (Leigh) is having an affair with his best friend (Ortiz), and he’s so consumed with things that he doesn’t notice them canoodling. His therapist (Bening) is getting agitated that her husband (DeVito) is wasting his time making a documentary with DW instead of getting work directing sitcoms. But then a dame – the chairman’s assistant (DeWanda Wise) – walks into his gated pool area one day and seems to confirm his suspicions, sending this gang of goofballs on a quest to take them down.
What follows is an endurance test of one’s patience that ranks on the government services scale of frustration somewhere between a DMV visit and a zoning board hearing. What Chinatown needed, it seems, is five comic relief characters competing to be heard over one another at various points. This is an orgy of cacophony, with the ensemble just searching for that one bit that will get a laugh and fall into hysterics instead of any penned support. It’s very hard to make a movie this referential without just stepping over into parody, and it turns out that a much better version of this movie was made, as fate would have it, from the bones of the proposed script for a third Chinatown movie. That was Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which does a Chinatown-style plot without ever directly mentioning Jake Gittes once. Then there are the dream sequences, in which DB grasps at some threads of memory that he can’t seem to fully remember, that are intended to serve as set up for an emotional resolution at the end of the film but in practice provide the viewer with the knowledge that they could have been watching The Big Lebowski for the hundredth time at home and probably being more entertained and fulfilled.
As the film meanders towards its conclusion – Pine mistakes the intrigue that’s set up over the course of Polanski’s deliberately-paced movie for resolution-free filler – it starts to try and slip from comedy to meaning-making, in which motivational poster phrases and lengthy quotes from once-buzzy Scandinavian writers attempt to impart knowledge to the viewer. This is precisely where Poolman lost the audience. It’s one thing to watch a bad movie and another to watch a bad sermon, and the script here manages to take the worst traits from both. Tobolowsky and Pine do some gorgeous work at the film’s climax, and for a second, it becomes clear what a decent version of this movie would look like. That’s almost immediately undone by lines from Chicken Soup for the Poolman’s Soul and followed by one of the most bizarre location-defying events I think I’ve ever seen in a movie with a cast of this pedigree as if the blocking never occurred to anyone when setting it up. Let me say that the latter kind of error isn’t particularly present in Poolman, but its presence amidst the former makes it stand out.
I hope the bad press – my review included – doesn’t stop Pine from directing another film because he might do something interesting should the right project appear for him, and the skill is there. But I hope he finds another writer, as two hours spent with the Poolman brain trust were more than enough to last a lifetime.