At
least it is not a three day weekend.
However, a handful of aging smug hipsters can make forty-eight hours
feel like a month of Mondays. Viewers
should be forewarned, the fake banter flies fast and furious in
writer-director-star Julie Delpy’s 2 Days
in New York (trailer
here), which
opens tomorrow in New York.
Delpy’s
Marion has dumped Jack from 2 Days in
Paris and moved to New York, where she took up with Mingus, a professional
Obama apologist on a hip hop radio station.
It must have been because of his cool name, rather than his
self-absorbed personality. Regardless,
they seem to be happy raising their kids together, until her daft father
Jeannot, nymphomaniac sister Rose, and Rose’s stoner ex-boyfriend Manu pay a
visit. Each has their own aggressively irritating
foibles guaranteed to stretch Marion’s relationship with Mingus to its snapping
point. Adding further stress, Marion’s
gallery show is fast approaching, where she is scheduled to sell her soul as an
exercise in performance art at the opening.
Have
you ever been stuck in a queue behind an annoying couple that takes advantage
of their captive audience to loudly “perform” their cleverest repartee? 2 Days
in New York is like ninety-one minutes of that sort of material. There are precisely two very funny bits,
because they each contain more than a kernel of truth. In one scene, Marion’s family scandalizes
Mingus’s friends when they proclaim they like Obama because he is a
socialist. Later, in a truly inspired
sequence, Marion meets with Vincent Gallo (playing himself), who bought her
soul and is ready to take possession. It
is the sort of thing one can see Gallo doing, which is why it is so
hilarious. It is not enough to justify a
ticket though, especially here in the City.
2 Days proves simply
acting neurotic does not automatically make you funny—just irksome. As Mingus, Chris Rock displays no edge
whatsoever. It is an embarrassing screen
turn, largely defined by his star-struck hero-worship for the current Oval
Office occupier. Likewise, Delpy’s hot
mess shtick gets old quick. 2 Days might have actually worked on a
subversive level, if the French invaders were interesting enough to root for,
but they are not. Frankly, even Jeannot,
played by Delpy’s real life father Albert, is little more than a grouchy
grandpa run amok.
