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Get Paul Giamatti up on stage at the Sundance Film Festival and all he does is sarcastically mumble answers to the crowd’s questions. Get him on screen at Sundance though, and he produces cinematic gold.
“I don’t know what I was doing in this movie,” Giamatti jokingly told the Sundance crowd at a screening of his film “Pretty Bird,” in which he plays a rocket scientist.
“I didn’t do any research (for the role) at all,” he said in his familiar deadpan delivery.
“Pretty Bird” is the directing debut of actor Paul Schneider (“Elizabethtown”). It follows Curtis (Billy Crudup), a scheming, overly cheerful entrepreneur who dupes a rich friend (David Hornsby) and a scientist (Giamatti) into joining him in creating and marketing a rocket-powered belt prototype.
“I felt like it was sort of a drama about the pursuit of success and the dark and harrowing side of ambition,” Schneider told the crowd. “(It’s about) that fear that ‘am I ever going to do anything that amounts to anything?'”
Schneider said he got the idea from a story he heard about a group in Texas who tried to do the same thing. He said he got the story arcs of the three characters from the bizarre story.
“I read some Internet articles and got familiar with the story,” Schneider said. “I didn’t want to do too much research that I’d feel obligated to say ‘this is what happened.'”
Giamatti and Crudup’s screen time together carries the film. Giamatti’s sarcastic-scientist-with-anger-management-and-authority-issues character is priceless. Crudup delivers 95 percent of his lines as though he is telling a 5-year-old that he or she can have all the ice cream in the world. Combined, these two characters make the film worth seeing multiple times.
Hornsby rounds out the trio well. He plays a neurotic, wimpy mattress store owner who always falls for Curtis’ schemes.
“Pretty Bird” is a unique buddy comedy with a unique story line. The characters carry the film despite the story line, which needs a few more layers to be worth the amount of time spent on it. It is defiantly worth seeing, however.
As for Schneider’s future as a director?
“When I was in film school I hated being a director and I still do, really,” Schneider said. “(‘Pretty Bird’) was just the idea that appealed to me and the producers.”
Pat Devers can be reached at [email protected].
