Screwball: Eccentric, impulsively whimsical.
Screw-up: One that makes a mess of an undertaking; a bungler.
Example: When Brendan Met Trudy, a new Irish film by first-time feature director Kieron J. Walsh from a script by Roddy Doyle of Commitments fame.
It's a romance between a straight guy and a crooked gal.
Brendan (Peter McDonald) is a schoolteacher bored to the point of negligence, locked in routine to the point of menu-planning by day of the week and socially isolated to the point where weekly church choir practice is the height of his human interaction. And even his choir colleagues think him a boring wank. McDonald's performance combines Mr. Bean physicality with a stupor-faced stare and stuttering hesitancy, each an unfortunate choice.
Movies are the main joy in Brendan's life, but his habit of overanalyzing the life out of them takes a lot of the joy with it.
In a movie not nearly as funny as it thinks, here's something that really is, just not in the right way: It desperately wants to feel like one of those old-fashioned classic movies he loves and there are endless references and homages to old films.
But from this movie's opening scene, when Brendan is lying face down in a puddle a la the closing scene in Sunset Boulevard and he then announces, "This is Sunset Boulevard," it's all that heavy-handed. Homages as primers for people who've never seen what is being paid homage.
Anyway, enter Trudy (Flora Montgomery, who like her character, does the best she can with the material she's given). Trudy ambushes Brendan in a bar with her I-dare-ya personality.
He's smitten. He invites her to the cinema, she stands him up, he stalks her, woos her, wins her and so on.
The main events of the so-on part concern Trudy's attempts to cure Brendan of emotional constipation. She does it figuratively by sharing with him her life of crime. She's a burglar. She does it literally by asking him to defecate on someone's living room floor as proof of his love. Or maybe that was meant as a within-the-movie review, who knows?
Burglary, by the way, is presented throughout as a metaphor for Trudy's seize-life free spirit and never as a crime with victims. Brendan's "improvement" is his embracing of it.
When Brendan yearns to be described as 'magical,' but is as charmless as those annoying rent-a-magicians who press their tricks on people at parties. It's frantically packed with needless bits of business. No tangent is too pointless to take, no joke too weak to run with.
Somewhere around the edges, a better movie exists. It's a satire, caught in quick glimpses of TV newscasts, national boosterism and sheeplike following of schlock pop culture.
That the two movies could successfully co-exist in this one is as unconvincing a pairing as that of Trudy and Brendan.
(This film is rated AA)
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