Peter Bogdanovich's problematic tribute to the screwball comedy – already celebrated in the director's infinitely more successful What's Up Doc? – begins with a title card that seeks to prematurely deflect criticism. "We believe in the old saying that the facts should never get in the way of a good yarn," it concludes. Fair enough. If we're taking She's Funny That Way to be nothing more than a "yarn" then we can, maybe, forgive the galloping coincidences and startling improbabilities. This is, after all, a world in which theatre directors cast unknown actresses in lead roles after hearing just one brief audition piece.
None of this does much, however, to deflect from the jaw-droppingly unreconstructed attitude to women. Owen Wilson plays Arnold, an impresario who, on his evenings away from the limelight, hires “call girls” (hello 1974, how you doin’?) and, if suitably impressed, offers them $30,000 to transform their lives. None ends up winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. One becomes manager of an upmarket store. Another promotes herself to madame of a posh brothel. Take that, women’s lib!
Arnold’s latest heart of gold belongs to an assertive working girl played by the admirably tireless Imogen Poots. She flaunts the sort of dumb-bright persona that Judy Holliday perfected 70 years ago, but, thanks to other, equally dubious nostalgia trips by a contemporary of Peter’s, more viewers will be reminded of Woody Allen films than those of George Cukor. Her broad Brooklyn accent alone (carried off admirably by the Chiswick girl) reeks of Allen’s dusty comic reinventions.
We do not have nearly enough space to summarise the buzzing, thrown-together subplots: Jennifer Aniston is a locum psychiatrist; Kathryn Hahn is Wilson’s justifiably jealous wife; Rhys Ifans, playing a teen heartthrob, fails to convince us that Rhys Ifans could ever be more famous than Rhys Ifans is now. It is, however, worth focusing on George Morfogen’s mind-boggling turn as a “gumshoe” from (apparently) a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. He wears a false moustache. He dresses as a rabbi. Disappointingly, he does not become a crime-fighting Ninja poodle when night falls.
