Movie Box Review

THE BIG YEAR:  Watch It At Home - Very Small Pleasures

THE BIG YEAR is an amiable, good-natured comedy that's so insubstantial it seems to fly out of your memory even as you're watching it.  If it had been a low-budgeted indie that turned up at a film festival, it might have felt like a tiny delight, but with a big-studio sheen and the combined talents of Steve Martin, Jack Black, Owen Wilson, and director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) involved, it all feels a little like a waste.

The subject is birding, where a "Big Year" is what the enthusiast can claim who manages to see more species of birds than anyone else that year.   There's no prize, cash or otherwise, apart from a bit of notoreity within the birding community, and of course the satisfaction of being the winner.  (This is all inspired by a real event:  Howard Franklin's script is based on the nonfiction book by Mark Obmascik.)  Having a Big Year isn't easy:  by definition, it involves almost 365 days of nonstop travel, seeking out the birds as they appear anywhere in the US.  Our 3 protagonists all seek the title for their own reasons.  Stu Preissler (Martin) has been a hard-driving businessman all his life; now that he's retired, he can finally devote his efforts--and wealth--to accomplishing his Big Year.  Kenny Bostick (Wilson) has won the title before, ruining his first marriage, and he's grimly determined to do it again, despite growing tensions with his new wife (Rosamund Pike).  And Brad Harris (Black)'s whole life has been a disappointment; he's decided that completing a Big Year is where he'll make his stand and finally score a victory.

We follow all of them as they crisscross the nation, up to and including Alaska, following every rumor, flying and driving and tramping every terrain, looking for the rarest of birds and, as they gradually discover who their competition is, trying to gain advantages.  It's sort of a very low-key, almost New Age version of a Cannonball Run concept, but this time the rivals are genial practically all the time.  Franklin's script has plenty of amusing incident, and story arcs for all the leads (when Brad sights a lovely birder played by Rashida Jones, you can bet she'll be back before the year ends).  There's the occasional show of selfishness by one character or another, but it's always mild, and often regretted afterward.

As a result, The Big Year is perfectly pleasant without being memorable in any way.  Black and Martiin's characters bond, and the two of them make a nice pair together.  Martin, at this point, is an ultimate smoothie in this kind of role, and Black subdues his usual frenzy quite a bit.  Wilson isn't ideally cast as the most driven of the competitors (he had worked with Frankel on Marley & Me); his general laid-back persona removes most of the threat from even the most underhanded of Kenny's tactics.  The other very fine performers who turn up in smaller roles include Kevin Pollak, Joel McHale, Anjelica Huston, JoBeth Williams, Brian Dennehy, Dianne Wiest, Anthony Anderson, Jim Parsons, and Tim Blake Nelson.

Although there's some silliness in the storyline, Frankel modulates the tone most of the time to the same reasonably effective low-key level.  Visually, the film is unimpressive:  there are some nice scenic expanses shot by cinematographer Lawrence Sher, but the interiors look like the soundstages they are.  The other technical credits are very conventional.  

The Big Year isn't well-observed enough to be more than an ordinary Hollywood comedy, and while modesty can be a virtue, this wasn't necessarily the place for it.  Unlike its protagonists, the movie doesn't have that core of inspired madness that it takes to accomplish a crazy goal.

Deadline reported today that ABC Studios has signed Jesse Martin to a talent hold deal that, although it could end up with him being cast in a different ABCS project, is largely in place so he'll be available for a redeveloped version of Marc Cherry's HALLELUJAH pilot, for which Cherry is writing a new script.  That makes it one of the season's select busted pilots that, like the plague victim in Monty Python & the Holy Grail, can protest "I'm not dead yet!" as they try to cart it off.

In its current incarnation, Hallelujah isn't quite distinctive enough.  Cherry, of course, is the creator of Desperate Housewives, and even though this show is set in a small town rather than a suburb, it has a shiff of that series and a similar look (feature director Michael Apted directed the pilot, and although his credits include Bond and Narnia movies, along with HBO's Rome, visually Hallelujah is very bland).  It even more resembles some recent ABC failures like Happy Town and Eastwick that tried to mix a traditional soap story--evil powerful family dominates a town, a few rebels plot against them--with the supernatural.  In the case of Hallelujah, this added ingredient is religion.

Hallelujah, Tennessee's evil patriarch is Del Roman (Terry O'Quinn, the beloved John Locke of Lost, here very much in Man In Black mode).  He has a hot young wife (Arielle Kebbel) and he owns the distillery that used to belong to the Turner family--until that patriarch died under mysterious circumstances.  The remaining Turner family is headed by recovering alcoholic Rye (Donal Logue), whose marriage with Ruth (Frances O'Connor) is shadowed not only by that tragedy, but by an accident 2 years ago that caused brain damage to their young son.  Even as Rye tries to figure out how to unseat the ruthless Del, both the Romans and the Turners have nubile teen children who, the pilot makes clear, will soon be involved in a Montague/Capulet romance. 

Into all of this comes Jared (Martin), a drifter who has a prison record but also healing powers, and who makes it clear that he won't tolerate those who do others wrong.  (In what may be a piece of in-joke casting, Del's former housekeeper, now taking an honored place in his home, is played by Della Reese, former star of Touched By An Angel.)  Illicit romances and murders will litter the storyline, but the main conflict of the series would be Good (Jared and Rye) vs Evil (Del). 

Cherry is a thorough professional, and Hallelujah is well paced and absorbing enough, but there's nothing particularly memorable going on.  None of the characters have any shading--they're either wearing white hats or black hats--and since we know God is on Jared's side, there's not a lot of tension.  What does work in the pilot is the cast:  Martin, O'Quinn, Logue and O'Connor are all excellent--but ABC let the cast options lapse, and only Martin and O'Quinn are likely to be courted for a new version. 

It'll be interesting to see how things develop with Hallelujah.  The network's relationship with Cherry is an important one, but he'll continue to do new development along with the additional Hallelujah script, and Martin would be a valuable piece of talent even if he's ultimately cast into a different project.  Based on its original pilot, Hallelujah will need more than prayer to make its way onto ABC's schedule.