Listen Up Philip

Oh, the bittersweet deliciousness of being an asshole. Listen Up Philip revels in it. Director Alex Ross Perry has said in interviews that his film is an amalgamated homage to Philip Roth, and the title card uses the jacket font of Roth's sex-crazed novel Portnoy's Complaint. The film blends up the spirit of a self-obsessed, self-hating New York Jewish Lothario just like the Canadians do whiskey, with some of the edge shaved off.

True to our times, Listen Up Philip is a coming-of-age movie about a man in his 30s—arrogant, unlovable Philip Lewis Friedman (Jason Schwartzman). Friedman escapes his supportive girlfriend (Elisabeth Moss) to a cottage owned by a lonely, embittered novelist named Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), a stand-in for Roth. The older man offers Friedman a tutorial in how to fuck up a life, which he drinks in with wide eyes and a trusting heart, ready to commit himself to a life of casual savagery. Zimmerman also lands his protégé a job at a snooty upstate college, where he is predictably unhappy.

But as much Roth as there is in this film, Friedman is no Nathan Zuckerman. Roth's best-known character was always deeply in and of the world, drunk with experience; Friedman is instead isolated, angry and deeply stupid about humans. "You have a very hurtful way of acting unfazed," he says to an ex-girlfriend he's trying to impress, before telling her she was the worst thing that ever happened to him. He excoriates his wheelchair-bound college roommate for being less successful than he is.

The humor of the film comes not quite from wit—the character isn't witty so much as preciously clever—but from the sheer audacity of his blindered awfulness and entitled victimhood. But my God, it's cathartic, and Schwartzman has a natural likability that carries his character like a galloping horse. He wanders the world as aimlessly as Caine in Kung Fu, leaving ill will behind him. One could make a drinking game out of the dirty looks he gets.

The film is marred by a somewhat cutesy voice-over—a novelist's omniscient narration that comes across as boorish intrusion—and it's oddly disjointed, wandering off digressively into the life of Moss' character as a perhaps tacit commentary on Roth's treatment of women. But it is still Schwartzman's film. Friedman will never be happy; we know this. But as we watch, the childish man learns how to be unhappy as an adult.

Critic's Grade: B+

SEE IT: Listen Up Philip opens Friday at Cinema 21.

WWeek 2015