Welcome back to Bastards in Bohemia. Those crazy, bearded Caucasian solipsists are at it again. They’re droning on endlessly to their implausibly tolerant, equally Caucasian romantic partners about the courageous breadth of their artistic ambitions. They’re doing this to the strains of cool jazz in a version of New York where nobody ever sends a text or reads an email.
Late in Listen Up Philip, the most misused female, apparently living in the world of Edith Wharton, rejects attempts at reconciliation with her estranged boyfriend by casting his letter into the wastepaper basket. A letter? How did it get there with the War of the Spanish Succession casting the world into such chaos?
Alex Ross Perry's brave semi-comedy treads in the same waters as Noah Baumbach, Woody Allen and other recent exercises in Gotham Boho such as Appropriate Behaviour and Obvious Child. Not even the Bloomsbury Group was so keen on documenting the ghastliness of its own innards.
Mr Perry seems intent on testing our tolerance for the Bastards in Bohemia (New York Chapter) to all limits in Listen Up Philip. No, that's not quite right. We're surely not expected to exhibit even the mildest tolerance for Jason Schwartzman's monstrous title character. A young novelist on the brink of significant success, Philip kicks up typhoons of self-regard and insecurity wherever he travels. Virtually every second line could stand as evidence of his terminal ghastliness.
“I hope this will be good for us, but especially for me,” he says of a change in circumstances with his girlfriend Ashley (Elisabeth Moss). “It’s not ‘cool’. It’s fucking amazing,” he admonishes an admirer who offers support.
Mind you, Philip receives little encouragement to behave otherwise in this universe. With one notable exception, every major character in Listen Up Philip is some sort of monster.
During a typically fractious meeting with his editor, our horrible anti-hero – Raskolnikov beard and Hitler fringe – is informed that a senior novelist named Zimmerman has taken a shine to his work. Played with poisonous boredom by Jonathan Pryce, Zimmerman is an only mildly heightened variation on many negative profiles of Philip Roth.
After shaking off poor Ashley, Philip travels to Zimmerman’s retreat for an episode of the severely Rothian Bastards in Upstate New York. There is an argument with Zimmerman’s horrible daughter. The older and younger writers say dreadful things over Laphroaig and cigars. Philip secures work teaching creative writing and we embark on the sort of Bastards in Academia fun that enlivens novels by David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury.
You have to admire Perry for carrying it off with such conviction. Narrated by Eric Bogosian in the style of a 1950s noir, the film shows an endless capacity for absorbing bad behaviour. Philip may claim that he wants to become a "tolerable person", but Listen Up Philip would never be so sentimental as to allow such transformation. Schwartzmann's voice is at its flattest and most nasal. Pryce taps his Welsh melancholy to soak the screen in bitterness and regret.
All of which sounds more fun that it actually turns out to be (to a misanthrope such as this writer, anyway). The dialogue is savage, but lacks sufficient wit to calm our turned stomachs. The film meanders without ever finding a true direction.
Perhaps the most telling criticism is that Listen Up Philip feels most enjoyable during its least characteristic moments. In the centre of the film, Elisabeth Moss, poignantly long-suffering as Ashley, potters tentatively around a fuzzy New York as she seeks to address life without Philip. She picks up a fat cat from the shelter and names him after Godzilla's son. She remembers awful outrages from the troubled relationship.
It’s not just that the atmosphere lightens. Ashley’s story actually feels considerably more believable than the contrived wretchedness of Philip’s horrible odyssey.
Lighten up, Perry.
