She’s Funny That Way

She’s Funny That Way (12A)

USA 2014  92 mins  Dir: Peter Bogdanovich  Starring: Jennifer Aniston, Imogen Poots, Quentin Tarantino, Will Forte, Owen Wilson, Kathryn Hahn, Lucy Punch, Tatum O’Neal, Cybill Shepherd, Rhys Ifans, Joanna Lumley

Whatever unprolific Peter Bogdanovich does is always going to be compared unfavourably with the brilliance of his early work, notably The Last Picture Show. It’s been nearly 15 years since his previous film, The Cat’s Meow – an unfairly panned acid portrait of prohibition-era Hollywood. Inevitably, the knives have also been out for She’s Funny That Way, which turns out to be a moderately enjoyable if somewhat dated screwball comedy-cum-bedroom farce with echoes of Woody Allen’s lesser work.

Like The Cat’s Meow, it’s framed in flashback. Perky prostitute-turned-Hollywood starlet Isabella Patterson (Poots) relates her life story to a probing hackette. In trad tart-with-a-heart style, she sees her former clients as “… poor souls empty of magic. My job was to breathe life back into them.” One of these is serially philandering philanthopist Arnold Albertson (Wilson), a Broadway director who hands her $30,000 to come off the game and pursue her dreams of becoming an actress. Unfortunately for him, that leads to her landing the role of a call girl in his new play, A Grecian Evening, alongside Albertson’s unwitting wife Delta (Hahn) and bigshot star Seth Gilbert (Ifans), who once had a ‘thing’ with Delta in London. Playwright Joshua (Forte) becomes smitten with Isabella, despite dating the world’s worst therapist Jane (Aniston). Jane is also treating Isabella, who was gifted a lifetime of therapy by a former client.

Further entanglements and absurd coincidences drive the story along, with a cameo-stuffed cast that lacks only Brian Rix. Watch out for Lucy Punch as an Eastern European call girl, Joanna Lumley riffing on AbFab‘s Patsy as Jane’s alcoholic mother (who appears only during the end credits), Curb Your Enthusiasm‘s Richard Lewis as Isabella’s dad, Last Picture Show star Cybill Shepherd as her mum, blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em roles for Michael Shannon and Paper Moon/Nickelodeon star Tatum O’Neal, and a payoff celebrity director cameo. Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach are on board too, paying obeisance as Executive Producers. The sexual politics are decidedly, ahem, old-school, while clumsy references to Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown prove rather unwise. Owen Wilson does his whiny Woody Allen shtick again, and it’s rather hard to believe in Rhys Ifans as a major hearthrob. Jennifer Aniston gets many of the best lines as the abrupt, judgemental (“Call girl? That’s disgusting!”) passive-aggressive therapist and author of Bitchy is Beautiful. She’s Funny That Way is certainly not the disaster some would have you believe, delivering just about enough larfs to make it worth a look when it pops up on telly, though it probably helps to be unfamiliar with the director’s glittering past.