Steve Coogan and Will Forte are best known as comedy performers, but in “Philomena” and “Nebraska” respectively, they find themselves in the unusual position of playing straight men.
Reluctantly at first, the men they play join the quests of stubborn oldsters whose quirks are the prime source of each drama’s quiet humor. How well do they cope with this? In an ego-less performance, Forte gives over completely. His underplaying not only benefits Bruce Dern’s more pronounced turn as his curmudgeonly father, but makes the regular, unfulfilled guy he plays memorable.
Playing a real man who has tasted public success, Coogan can’t entirely relinquish the distancing irony that defines his comic persona, but nonetheless pulls off the serious moments in a story founded on tragedy. His performance begs the question: when is he going to opt for full-on gravitas?
In “What Maisie Knew,” Coogan plays an art-dealer dad whose absences have negative consequences for his little girl, but the actor still got to joke a lot in character. His London softcore porn magnate Paul Raymond, in the fact-based “The Look of Love,” passes on his sybaritic lifestyle to the daughter he dotes on and spoils, but Coogan’s studied bluffness — which can deprive his characters of naturalism — undercuts Raymond’s tragic trajectory.
Unquestionably, Coogan is subtler in “Philomena” (which he co-wrote), as the British journalist, author, and former civil servant Martin Sixsmith. At the start of Stephen Frears’s film, Sixsmith is a disillusioned figure, burned by his involvement in a Labour government scandal that he had tried to prevent.
Though he would rather write a book about Russian history, his field of expertise, he grudgingly agrees to help an Irish-Catholic woman, Philomena Lee (Judi Dench), who has been searching for her son for 50 years. Lee, who is now 80, was an unmarried teenager when she was forced into a Tipperary convent in 1952 for conceiving a child; in 1955, the nuns there sold the 3-year-old to an American couple.
The search for the son pairs the little old lady, humble and forgiving, with the cynical, worldly journalist. They travel to the convent together and eventually to America. Oxford and Harvard haven’t prepared Sixsmith for dealing with a retired nurse whose taste in literature is sentimental romance fiction.
When Philomena describes in detail to him the plot of the novel she is reading as they ride to an airport departure lounge, he feigns interest while inwardly screaming for her monologue to cease. Coogan modifies Sixsmith’s aloofness with politeness, but, of course, the actor-writer is still having a Cooganesque joke at the expense of women who are enthralled by bad novelettes.
As the story proceeds, though, Sixsmith’s cynicism is tempered by Lee’s resilience and integrity (Tom Cruise’s character was similarly humanized by Dustin Hoffman's in “Rain Man”), though not to the extent that he can forgive one of the nuns who condemned Philomena to life-long anguish. Philomena in turn acquires a little of Sixsmith’s professional grit.
Coogan and Dench make a highly watchable odd couple, and it’s noticeable that by the end the movie’s satirical edge has dulled, to its benefit. Playing a man who learns to care about caring makes Coogan more than merely entertaining — Frears must take some of the credit for that.
Although Forte never established a fixed comic identity on “Saturday Night Live,” he was reliably funny as the stupid blond sportscaster, Gilly’s admonishing teacher, MacGruber and so on. In Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska,” he wipes away any preconceptions with his flawless portrayal of a slightly depressed guy who recovers a long-buried sense of mischief on a road trip from Montana to Nebraska with his delusional dad.
Though scarcely a sadsack, Forte’s David Grant has a listless walk and a downward curving mouth, the results, perhaps, of growing up the weakest member of a dysfunctional family that bequeathed him no attitude, ambition, or decisiveness. His older brother, Ross (Bob Odenkirk), moved away from Billings years ago, married, had kids, and has just had a career breakthrough as a substitute news anchor. Recently dumped by his girlfriend, who moved out because he failed to propose, David works without vigor in an electronics store. He lives near his folks, Woody (Dern), an alcoholic Korean War vet on the cusp of senility, and Kate (June Squibb), a still hardy scold.
David is empathetic, however, as Woody, though traumatized into taciturnity as a young man, was generous, always ready with a helping hand. Consequently, when Woody won’t be dissuaded from traveling to Lincoln to collect $1 million in prize money that can’t possibly exist, David agrees to drive him there. It’s a fool’s errand with a crucial purpose: to spend time with the old coot before he dies.
The array of old timers they meet en route spill revelations that enable David to see Woody (and Kate, too) in several new lights. Woody is the film’s endless enigma, but David is its protagonist, whose reaction to an old bully (Stacy Keach) who sneers at his father tests his manhood once and for all. It’s an unexpected gift that warrants the giving of a gift in return. Forte’s sensitive presence and ability to show the glimmerings of a spark of rejuvenation suggest David may gradually shake off his humdrum ways, if not become a world-beater.
