Best Sellers (2021) There's no plot more cherished, beloved and pounded into the ground by indie filmmakers than the life changing road trip.
Especially a road trip that involves a crabby, feisty senior with one foot in the grave paired up with a perpetually exasperated, eye-rolling millennial
Exasperated and eye-rolling is usually my standard response to the idea of watching yet another one of these tiresome Sundance wanna-be's........
But I couldn't stay away from this one for three reasons.
1. Michael Caine, the international icon and treasure whom I'd watch in anything.
2. Aubrey Plaza, the unpredictable, live wire actress whom I'd also watch in anything.....and like Michael Caine, she's apt to turn up in just about anything at all, from major studio films to the most obscure indies imaginable.
3. Books! It's all about writers, books, the lifelong labor pains of an author's creative struggles and how books become enhancing, defining experiences in readers' lives....for better or worse. To put it simply, they had me at books.......
Hence this review.
Plaza plays Lucy Stanbridge, who's taken over her father's now floundering publishing company, It's a publishing house that built its reputation and fortune on the groundbreaking best selling novel of Harris Shaw (Caine) who hasn't offered up another book for decades.
Discovering Shaw's contract requires a second book from him, Lucy seeks out the reclusive, misanthropic and constantly drunk Shaw to demand he fulfill his legal obligation. Shaw, irascible and consumed with self loathing, has in fact completed a new novel. He grudgingly agrees to its publication and a promotional tour, but only if it's printed untouched and unedited by Lucy.
Lucy agrees, desperate to keep her company afloat and off they go, this mismatched duo, on a chaotic series of bookstore appearances.......where Shaw's public reading performances consist of nothing but him repeating his favorite word on an endless loop....'bullshite'.
Given our current society, the worse Shaw behaves, the more the public laps it up......book sales soar and Shaw's outrageous incidents turn him into a social media sensation.
Having seen dozens of similarly structured indie road trips, I could safely predict all the expected, heartbreaking revelations and epiphanies that occur between Lucy and Shaw before the film's bittersweet climax. And I'm not sure I'd bother with the film if it had starred two lesser actors.
It's Caine and Plaza who make "Best Sellers" worthwhile. Sir Michael inhabits the role like he waited all his life to play it and Plaza, never a shrinking violet of an actress, matches him scene for scene.
As worn out as this storyline is, the powerhouse collaboration of these two unique talents turns the film into a highly watchable 3 & 1/2 star (***1/2) treat. More than worth checking out.
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