Movie Review - Why Him?

Why Him? **½ (out of 5) (R) If the Meet the Parents films were too tame and subtle for you, this scion of their legacy may be right up your alley. Uptight Midwesterners (Bryan Cranston, Megan Mullalley) fly to California for the holidays to see their brilliant, wholesomely attractive daughter (Zoe Deutch), who is attending Stanford. Surprise!!! She’s got a beau (James Franco) who couldn’t possibly be more distasteful to her parents unless they were meeting him through a glass partition on Death Row. He’s apparently an enthusiastic man-child with no sense of social norms, living an innocently insular life on his ridiculously lavish estate, thanks to making a fortune more obscene than his free-spirited use of no-no words, from a batch of popular tech creations. This genius seems so sweetly clueless about the rest of life that something must be off.

Besides the shocks to Cranston’s 1950s’ sensibilities, he’s also trying to cope with the likely demise of the printing business he created, and what that will mean for him and a cadre of loyal, long-term employees. The culture clash between the two men over Deutch’s best interests, plus a few sidebars among the rest of the family, provide the story arcs and laughs. The R rating is for a surprisingly generous flow of no-no words, rather than the other MPAA criteria.

Everything about the setting, the characters and the course of the tale is about as over-the-top as one could imagine. The less seriously one takes any of this, the greater the odds for letting the often-inane comedy flourish. Franco seems to be having the most fun in the film, and likely on the set, for getting to toy with such an outrageous, yet endearing, role.

St. Louis native Cedric the Entertainer is one of the supporting players whose talents exceed their deployment. Among that group, honors on the “ain’t this a hoot” spectrum go to Keegan-Michael Key, as Franco’s counterpart to Bertie Wooster’s famous Jeeves, who likely wouldn’t approve of the movie or this reference. With apologies to that legendary literary butler, Mr. Wodehouse who created him, and Stephen Fry who portrayed him so magnificently for the BBC and our PBS, the allusion was offered with profound respect and gratitude for their stellar contributions to a different brand of comedy from kinder, gentler times. (12/23/16)