Imogene is not a new comedy classic. However, since Kristen Wiig is still a relatively fresh face in big screen comedy, her natural charm and talent make it far more watchable than it would be otherwise. Now liberated from weekly performances on SNL, Wiig will inevitably becomes a big screen fixture as a charmingly befuddled leading lady. At the moment, there’s still a novelty to seeing her do her thing on film and that’s just enough to elevate this material above the Sundance approved quirk comedy despot. There are still plenty of problems with the movie, but thankfully Wiig isn’t one of them and having her do her thing in every scene ensures there are laughs to be found, if sparingly.

Wiig stars as Imogene (bet you didn’t see that coming!), a once heralded and award-winning playwright who let her gift slide away once a cushy New York lifestyle came a callin’. Now years away from her praise-filled prime, Imogene’s life is defined by dull n’ ritzy social engagements, writing empty-headed magazine blurbs, and being seen with her successful boyfriend. That’s a bubble destined to pop and it does almost instantly when her boyfriend suddenly dumps her and in a bout of bitter insanity she writes some vicious theater blurbs that cost her a job. Manhattan living ain’t for the poor, so with her apartment/lifestyle about to disappear Imogene stages a suicide attempt in desperate a cry for help. Than plan is for her boyfriend and friends to arrive desperate to return her life to normal. This being a comedy, things don’t’ quite go as planned (cue laughter).

She’s instead saved by her gambling addict mother (Annette Bening) and pulled back to the Jersey existence that she abandoned long ago. This being a quirk-comedy, her childhood home is inevitably filled with eccentrics ranging from Bening’s new beau Matt Dillan who claims to be in the CIA and a conduit for lighting, her obscenely introverted brother (Christopher Fitzgerald) who has constructed a mechanical shell to hide in the hermit crabs he idolizes, and a pretty young man (Darren Criss) who is renting out her bedroom while performing in a Backstreet Boys cover band at night. The whole thing guarantees that Imogene’s emotional breakdown will keep on trucking as Wiig dons her old 90s white trash cloths and struggles to pull her life back together. Of course, the set up also comes with a built in love interest and a collection of eccentrics perfect to finally inspire that comeback play. Grab your sentimental 90s mixtape folks, because we’re about to take a ride into inspirational gentle comedy country.

Wiig of course charms in the role as the depressed woman too smart for her own good and perpetually on the brink of a nervous breakdown. She’s a talent that can supersede even this overwrought neurotic role and hopefully it’s the start of a string of big screen leads (better screenplays to serve her talent wouldn’t hurt either). Benning and Dillan are also able to elevate the material through charismatic performances, even if Dillan gets far too little screentime and Benning has some thankless exposition to deliver. Other than that, the movie struggles to connect for heart or laughs. This is one of those comedies we’ve seen far too many of in the 2000s. Characters aren’t just defined by quirks, they are their quirks. It’s supposed to seem charming, but feels half-baked and underdeveloped. Much like how the 90s were overrun by verbose crime comedies desperate to be Tarantino movies, too many indie comedies from the last decade have tried to copy the Wes Anderson formula with tales of quirky broken families and rarely pull it off. Anderson’s movies are special because there is real tragedy between the laughs and actual scarred humans behind his heavily costumed characters. Movies like Imogene find ways to approximate his style, but never get his resonance. That’s ultimately just posing.

That said, I don’t want to be too hard on Imogene. The movie isn’t bad, it’s just mediocre. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been done better in previous movies, but at least the 103 minutes pass by fairly painlessly, if predictably. The real head-scratchers of the whole endeavor are co-directors Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman. When they made the jump from documentaries to features with American Splendor, they created something truly special. The mix of comedy and pathos as well as fiction and non-fiction was inspired. The result was one of the finest films of the 2000s. Since then, the pair have cranked out fairly bland comedies like this or The Nanny Diaries. The duo who once seemed so filled with promise have quickly become predictably simplistic in their filmmaking. American Splendor was so strong that I can’t help but hope they’ll make at least one more movie even half that good, but the more time passes the more it seems that their work was elevated by collaborator/contributor Harvey Pekar. Left to their own devices they can make pleasant distractions like Imogene, it’s just a shame that recapturing even a fracture of the magic of their debut increasing seems unlikely. Ah well, at least their movies aren’t terrible. There’s just no denying Imogene has charm, it can just feel as hopelessly lost as it’s protagonist for most of the running time. 

_____

Phil Brown writes about film for Toronto Standard.