Cast: Ian Holm, Stanley Tucci, Patricia Clarkson, Hope Davis, Steve Martin, Susan Sarandon, Patrick Tovatt, Celia Weston, Allan Corduner, Alice Drummond
Director: Stanley Tucci
Producers: Beth Alexander, Stanley Tucci, Charles Weinstock
Screenplay: Howard A. Rodman, based on magazine articles by Joseph Mitchell
Cinematography: Maryse Alberti
Music: Evan Lurie
U.S. Distributor: USA Films
The Sundance Film Festival often likes inviting big names - or at least big names in the independent arena - to premiere films at the festival. It makes for good press and generates a little extra excitement. Often, however, these big names lead to big disappointments. A case in point is Stanley Tucci's third directorial effort, Joe Gould's Secret, which was the Park City opening night feature. To hear it described, Joe Gould's Secret sounds interesting, and it has an impressive cast that includes Ian Holm, Tucci, Hope Davis, Susan Sarandon, and Steve Martin. However, Tucci's sluggish directorial style not only distances the audience from the story, but threatens to put everyone in the theater to sleep.
Clearly, Tucci is not growing as a director - which is unfortunate, because his debut feature, Big Night (co-directed with Campbell Scott), indicated that he was a talent behind the camera to watch. His follow-up, The Impostors, was an enjoyable slapstick exercise with a couple of brilliant comic moments, but represented a step down. Now, with Joe Gould's Secret, Tucci has stumbled even farther in the wrong direction on the creative ladder. This meandering, overlong movie is rescued from the cinematic rubbish heap solely by Ian Holm's performance, a stylish production design, and a few nice, humorous touches.
Joe Gould's Secret is based on a true story (as the end credit disclaimer goes to great pains to point out). Joe Mitchell (played here by Stanley Tucci), a writer for The New Yorker magazine, wrote two articles separated by thirty years about Joe Gould. The first, "Professor Seagull", was published during the 1940s and introduced the odd character of Joe Gould (Ian Holm) to the reading public. The second, Mitchell's last contribution to The New Yorker, was entitled "Joe Gould's Secret", and revealed a few things that had lain buried with Gould for decades. Tucci and screenwriter Howard A. Rodman have used these articles as the basis for this motion picture.
Joe Gould is a Greenwich Village eccentric - a homeless man of great wit and wisdom whose haggard appearance either amuses or repulses most of those he meets. "Please don't think me stupid just because I'm unclean," he cautions, and with good reason - he is the author of an exceedingly ambitious work called The Oral History of the World. It's a 1,300,000 word tome that has resulted from Gould's lifelong experiences of listening to people and writing down what they say - "a repository of jabber." One day, Joe Mitchell meets Joe Gould in a diner, and becomes fascinated by the grubby older man. Gould elects to show part of his Oral History to Mitchell, and Mitchell agrees to write an article about Gould. As the two get to know each other, they develop a level of mutual respect and affection, but, once the article is finished, Mitchell wants to move on to other projects, but Gould, who is lonely, clings to his friend like a leech.
Seen from one vantage point, Joe Gould's Secret could be viewed as an exploration of the uncertain line between madness and genius. The title character clearly fits both descriptions; what's uncertain is on which side of the line he more commonly falls. The movie also takes a look at the exploitation of a subject by a journalist. Although Mitchell is a sympathetic guy, there's no doubt that he uses, then discards, Gould. Once the story is written, Gould seeks to continue the relationship, but Mitchell wants it to stop. This raises a question about where a journalist's responsibility ends, especially if his work changes the life and circumstances of the person he was writing about (essentially the same subject considered by Michael Mann's vastly different The Insider).
The problem with the film isn't as much the story as it is the manner in which Tucci has chosen to bring it to the screen. His vision of 1940s New York is impeccable - he effectively evokes the time period - but the characters become as remote as the setting. Joe Gould's Secret drags. The tone is somnambulant, Tucci's selection of shots and camera angles are flat and uninteresting, and one finds it difficult to care about or sympathize with anyone in the film. One of the bright spots is Ian Holm, who digs his teeth into one of those parts that gives actors the opportunity to act with gusto, but Holm by himself isn't enough to save the film. And, although Holm's character is the best fleshed-out, it's Mitchell, not Gould, who is intended to be our gateway into the film, and there's nothing remotely interesting here about Tucci or the man he plays.
So what do we end up with? An occasionally amusing but largely dreary story about a cantankerous oddball whose dubious claim to fame is a work that no one has read in its entirety. The film isn't terrible, but it is a bit of a chore to sit through. For Tucci, the lukewarm reception to Joe Gould's Secret should serve as a warning - if he doesn't reverse his directorial trend, his next movie may be unwatchable.
© 2000 James Berardinelli