That dead dog will do him in. Ben just knows it! A veteran Hollywood producer, Ben (played with frazzled authority by Robert De Niro) glances with restrained nervousness around the room during the focus group screening in the shrewd Hollywood send-up What Just Happened. Being evaluated by a crew of industry insiders and everyday nincompoops is Ben's latest production, a troubled picture called Fiercely. It stars Sean Penn as a hero pursued by bad men. The audience in the screening room isn't especially impressed until that final scene-and then the impression isn't favorable. The bad men kill Sean Penn's dog in a splatter of blood before executing Penn.
Gap mouthed horror! They killed the dog! Ben has that sinking feeling that the no-nonsense studio chief (an unflappable and impassive Catherine Keener) is not going to be happy. He isn't happy either.
Like his protagonist, director Barry Levinson is a veteran who knows his way around Hollywood and its outskirts. Over his long career Levinson won credibility for Diner, profitability with Good Morning Vietnam, an Oscar for Rain Man and a mixed track record in recent years with many compromised productions. Written by producer Art Linson, who adapted it from his own memoir, What JustHappened is Levinson's most artistically successful film since the political comedy Wag the Dog (1997). Benign satire becomes him.
Ben isn't a bad guy in What Just Happened, just a sometimes flummoxed and prickly power broker desperately hanging on in an industry without vision, common sense or the certainty of a future. He knows he's only as good as his last movie. Fiercely, panned by the focus group, seems destined to bring him down a rung or two on the power ladder.
It's not easy being at the top, and staying there is even harder. Ben navigates with some skill among powerful studio heads and egomaniacal talent. A possible moment of sexual healing with his most recent ex-wife (Robin Wright Penn) is interrupted by a cell phone call about a recalcitrant star. Problems multiply. The British director of Fiercely, Jeremy Brunell (Michael Wincott), throws a tantrum when denied full control of the pretentious potboiler. He thinks killing the dog is edgy. But Brunell is a crybaby pretending to be a roughneck, a wanker under all that punk rock Cockney swagger.
And he's not the only overgrown child Ben must wheedle and cajole. Bruce Willis plays himself with a beard-a problem in the eyes of the studio. They paid $20 million for Willis, not some bald guy with a beard. He shaves or they sue. He refuses to budge, bellowing on about his "artistic integrity."
Although deception comes as easily to Ben as breathing, he remains a sympathetic character, just a guy trying to make a living. Unlike Fiercely or other movies he produces, there are no bad men in What Just Happened-just people of varying ego sizes playing in an expensive sandbox under the hot glare of the klieg lights. In their gently amusing way, Levinson and Linson are saying that the whole system is preposterous. Let's just laugh along with it. n
What Just Happened opens Dec. 12 at Times Cinema.
