As a doting loving dad who has more than once embarrassed his brilliant young daughter, we finally steeled ourselves and submitted to the German-subtitled 2 hours and 42 minutes of "Toni Erdmann"......about a loving dad who makes a second career out of embarrassing his brilliant young daughter.......
But surprise, surprise.... the daughter, a driven, mirthless executive in the high powered corporate world, turns out to possess some of Daddy's freewheeling DNA after all.... .and the goofy old Pop, a retired joking prankster who favors Halloween Shop accessories and playing idiotic alter egos as he crashes his daughter's business meetings, knows his kid all too well.
The leisurely running time and the make-it-up-as-we-go-along scene structure insure that no awkward silence and no joke-gone-wrong goes unobserved..........at close to three hours, you quickly tire of the film's relentless attempts to make both you and characters uncomfortable.
By the time the movie resorted to a lengthy display of full frontal, we were already sighing and checking our watch. Poignant heartfelt moments? Yes there are.......they arrive like colorful billboards that pop up while you're driving across an arid desert landscape....
Supposedly in the works is an Americanized version of this with Jack Nicholson as the dad and Kristin Wiig as the daughter.........whether they'll impose discipline and structure on the shapeless, formless source material.....anyone's guess.
We can't place ourselves in either critical camp regarding "Toni Erdmann"......it's no groundbreaking, earth-shattering masterpiece.......and unlike the other end of that spectrum we didn't feel like labeling the film as an Emperor with no clothes....(even though there's any number of people in the movie who end up with no clothes). But we laughed more than few times.....and the father-daughter dynamic choked us up a little too.
For the individual memorable moments we cherry-picked out of the film....2 & 1/2 stars
(** 1.2).....somewhere under the jerky hand held camerawork and slapdash filmmaking, there's a great story struggling to crawl out.......who knows, maybe Nicholson and Wiig can bring it out.....
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