An Evening with Bev­er­ly Luff Linn

If there was ever a case study for a direc­tor shift­ing his tar­get demo­graph­ic from snick­er­ing adult low­brows to very small chil­dren who spend their days encased in their own bod­i­ly leav­ings, it’s An Evening with Bev­er­ly Luff Linn. Jim Hosk­ing achieved a kind of gross-out evo­lu­tion­ary leap with his admirably filthy 2016 fea­ture, The Greasy Stran­gler. He pushed the juve­nil­ia enve­lope so far, it slipped off the table and into a pud­dle of fetid sick and cream cheese. Yet instead of both­er­ing the col­lec­tive gag reflex once more, he’s returned with his take on a twist­ed, semi-earnest roman­tic com­e­dy, and it’s quite the misfire.

The cen­tral prob­lem with this new film is that Hosk­ing has cast a series of name actors as the leads, and each one comes with the bag­gage of past roles in clas­sic sit­coms and com­e­dy fran­chise bit parts. It appears as a nec­es­sary evil – a small con­ces­sion to the main­stream in the form of a small coterie of game, slight­ly out­ré per­son­al­i­ties. But this tac­tic back­fires. Aubrey Plaza is the sort-of lead, the twitchy, chain-smok­ing harpy Lulu whose wild mood-swing­ing recalls the brighter days and stronger writ­ing of her past as April in Parks and Recre­ation. The same goes for Jer­maine Clement, so lov­able as the inef­fec­tu­al dolt in Flight of the Con­cords, but some­thing is lost in trans­la­tion as he hasti­ly reworks the char­ac­ter for his role here as Col­in, an inef­fec­tu­al dolt and free­lance bodyguard.

The one excep­tion is Emile Hirsch, who brings some­thing entire­ly new to the table. As Lulu’s hot-tem­pered, cuck­old­ed hus­band, he seems to be chan­nelling Leonard DiCaprio’s pilled-up antics in The Wolf of Wall Street, work­ing won­ders with budg­ing blood ves­sels and a jut­ting low­er jaw. He’s the sole com­bustable pres­ence in the film, and it’s sad that he’s pret­ty much writ­ten out of pro­ceed­ings after the first 20 min­utes. His love­less mar­riage with Lulu receives a sud­den jolt when she sees an adver­tise­ment for a mag­i­cal evening with Bev­er­ly Luff Linn (a grunt­ing Craig Robin­son in neon golf tweeds) on the TV.

She swift­ly absconds with Col­in to a mar­itime-themed hotel, and excit­ed­ly waits for this show­case which, mys­te­ri­ous­ly, keeps get­ting pushed back in the sched­ule. This is when the film dies. Each new scene arrives and stokes the antic­i­pa­tion that some­thing real­ly bizarre or stu­pid will hap­pen, but it nev­er does. Hosk­ing relies on sil­ly non sequiturs and ram­bling anec­dotes, avoid­ing con­ven­tion­al punch­lines like they were some kind of evil curse. The cast don’t real­ly seem to under­stand or appre­ci­ate the type of film they’re mak­ing, but cer­tain­ly do as much as they can to lift the woe­ful­ly thin material.

And it’s a shame, as Hosk­ing is some­one who is plow­ing his own, wacky fur­row, and he absolute­ly should be allowed to do that. Yet this is a stul­ti­fy­ing, stu­pid, almost nihilis­ti­cal­ly shal­low work, which chal­lenges the patience while offer­ing scant reward. It recalls that stretch in the sec­ond sea­son of Twin Peaks where all the episodes become unwatch­ably irri­tat­ing. There are some weirdo non-actors in sup­port­ing roles who do bring some com­ic lev­i­ty to the brew, but it’s just not enough.