Toni Erdmann – A Dissent By Marilyn Penn
If you find the sight of a sixty-something man in a bad wig with false buck teeth a hilarious sight gag, you will like this movie. If you require some actual wit or clever comedic dialogue to make you laugh, you should watch an old Woody Allen film on Netflix and leave Toni Erdmann to the too-easily pleased. The setup for this movie is simple: A father is concerned that his accomplished adult daughter working in Bucharest at a high-powered consulting job is too uptight and missing out on the important things in life. To cure her of this misguided direction, he pays an unexpected visit to her Rumanian apartment – a visit that doesn’t go well. Rather than taking the hint that he’s unwelcome at this time, he decides to stalk his daughter and with the aid of his wig and tooth disguise, pop up at places and events that will embarrass and humiliate her to the breaking point. Despite looking like a deranged derelict, he is invited to join the events and activities that he has crashed with various false identities, leaving this viewer even more amazed than his daughter.
In the first place, the actor doesn’t look different enough with his masquerade – his own hair, teeth and body are sufficiently scruffy to make him a negative stand-out without the props. Secondly, since we have seen a bit of his own rather solitary life with his old dog , his ailing mother and a non-distinguished career as a music teacher, we wonder whether he’s the right person to teach his daughter much of anything. In this movie, being a “prankster’’ is synonymous with liveliness and love of life. From my seat, I saw an overgrown jerk whose adolescent fart pillow was unlikely to have been tolerated by any of the characters who people this film. A highlight of the movie is the daughter’s spontaneous decision to host her small birthday party in the nude and her insistence that to join the party, the guests must get naked too This belongs in the same category as finding wigs and false teeth super-funny; if seeing nude grownups in various stages of awkwardness gives you a giggle, you know where to find it. If it strikes you as too obvious to have symbolic impact, good for your discretionary taste. You might want to watch some reruns of Larry David for more insightful peeks into awkward behavior by clueless adults.
It won’t be a spoiler to tell you that things end up better than anyone deserves and far less funny than reviews have claimed. Perhaps because Germans have a sub-zero reputation for humor, critics have applied the equivalent of grade inflation to their evaluations of any attempt at this genre. Having summoned Larry David, I will now add his partner Jerry Seinfeld to remind everyone that until an episode on Seinfeld, no one had the guts to confess that despite its brilliant reviews, The English Patient was terminally boring. Keep that thought in mind – it’s a lot funnier than anything in Toni Erdmann.
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