The ever-lovin’ Bobby Cannavale enjoys a rare lead role in Ezra (now streaming on Paramount+), playing a struggling stand-up comic with a broken marriage, autistic son, daddy issues and anger issues in a drama with the occasional comedic flourish. Cannavale is one of those underappreciated role players who can kinda do it all (the strongest example of this? The Station Agent), so it’s nice to see him given a meaty and complicated character to play. Whether the rest of the movie – directed by Tony Goldwyn, who also has a supporting role – can meet Cannavale’s level of earnest commitment is the question, though.
The Gist: Max Brandel (Cannavale) used to write jokes for other people, but now he does it for himself. He’s the type of standup comic who sits on a stool with a glass of whiskey – neat – and gets confessional about his father, his son and his fatherhood. One night after a show, a woman from the audience buys him a drink and he takes her home and as soon as they’re done one-night-standing, he sits on the edge of the bed sobbing. So she bolts, and on the way out, runs into Max’s dad, Stan (Robert De Niro), who owns this home, and is fresh from his job as a doorman at a high-rise apartment building. “He cried, didn’t he?” Stan quips.
So what’s up with Max? Is it the fact that he gave up a decent living – or lost it due to his anger issues, which might be more accurate – to do his own comedy thing and now has to live with his dad? Or that his marriage to Jenna (Rose Byrne) is as dead as last night’s dinner? Or that his and Jenna’s son Ezra (William Fitzgerald) is autistic and on the verge of expulsion from public school due to his behavior? Well, it’s all of the above. And most of it pertains to Ezra, because his mother and teachers and advisers and doctors all want the boy to take medication and attend a special-needs school, and this is all stuff that Max doesn’t want. Why? Well, Max believes the boy will be best served via assimilation into the “real” world, and worries that he’ll grow up isolated. Legit concerns, for sure, but his reasoning seems flawed and outdated.
Max has his own issues. He’s stubborn and he’s rash and impulsive and makes bad decisions, and a lot of that seems to be a product of his upbringing. His mother left, and Stan is the type of old-school toughster whose advice about dealing with anger is to “bury it.” That philosophy doesn’t seem to be working: Max gets slapped with a restraining order after he lashes out at Ezra’s doctor. Max is one of those guys whose decisionmaking is, to put it bluntly, poor. And in an exercise in Making Everything Worse, Max sneaks into Jenna’s house and takes Ezra down the fire escape and drops him in the backseat of Stan’s vintage Cadillac convertible for a road trip. Max landed a standup gig on Jimmy Kimmel Live, see (his agent is played in a cameo by Whoopi Goldberg), and he has to get there by Friday or whatever. There’s nothing that’ll solve Movie Problems more than a road trip in a vintage convertible, right? Of course, what he’s doing is technically kidnapping. So there’s that.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Ezra is Rain Man crossed with the last movie in which De Niro played the grumpy father of a comedian, About My Father.
Performance Worth Watching: Cannavale can manage tricky dramedy tones as well as anyone in the biz. We’d love to see him in more weighty roles, please.
Memorable Dialogue: Rainn Wilson plays an old pal of Max’s, a doof who used to be a standup, and bursts with pride upon hearing about Max’s Kimmel gig: “Best I did was get bumped from Arsenio. Worst night of my life. Hasselhoff segment ran long.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Frustratingly, Ezra could be a thoughtful story about the complex relationship between fathers and sons who are trying to be themselves and change themselves and understand each other better, but the plot keeps getting in the way. Remove the contrivances and distractions inherent in a stereotypical Hollywood road trip – sideplotty detours via characters played by Wilson and Vera Farmiga, the inevitable scene where Ezra and Max see their own amber-alert report on a coffeeshop TV, Stan and Jenna hopping in the car to chase them to the Midwest – and you might have a good, solid character study instead of this well-meaning, but annoying collection of cliches.
Fitzgerald is excellent in a role that deals with Ezra’s issues as plot hurdles that need to be leapt — he loathes being physically touched, and he was mute for years but now speaks heavily in movie quotes — seems a little too much like a device for exploring the hows and whys of Max’s many character flaws. The young actor has autism, and peripheral discussions of Ezra inevitably veer toward the need for the production to sensitively and accurately portray his character. Consider that successful, but the writing ultimately fails these characters. The screenplay, by Tony Spiridakis, drops in the implication that maybe Max, too, is on the spectrum and undiagnosed, a compelling development that the film briefly implies then ignores.
It also seems to ignore the fatal logical flaw that never occurs to Max, namely, that his big-break Kimmel appearance is never going to happen, because it’s a no-brainer bet that he’ll be arrested before it happens. Perhaps he realizes this but never says it out loud; perhaps it’s less about the destination than what happens on the journey, whether it’s key bonding time with his boy or some time away from his fraught daily life, to think about what’s best for himself and for Ezra. None of this is made clear in a movie that never seems to know what it wants to accomplish. It warms our hearts a little bit, sure, but its insights are muddled and ultimately banal.
Our Call: Part of me wants ye olde road-trip plot to meet a Thelma and Louise fate. Extract it from Ezra and you’d likely have a much smarter movie with more room to expand upon Cannavale and Fitzgerald’s inspired performances. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.