Jason Schwartzman brings the height of his droll, if furtive everyman mien to the latest semi-surreal provocation by Austin-based comedy filmmaker Bob Byington (“Harmony & Me,” “Somebody Up There Likes Me”) to satisfying result. For “7 Chinese Brothers,” they’re peas in a misanthropic pod, plus Schwartzman’s own French bulldog Arrow co-stars to keep his character, Larry, sane through a daily life that’s a sequence of setbacks, despite financial infusions from his nursing-home-bound grandmother (Olympia Dukakis, droll, too). Larry’s a slacker, and not a very good one. (He’s a much finer inebriate.) He’d be a jerk if Jason Schwartzman didn’t inhabit him like breath inhabits a fast-talking body. All right, Larry is a jerk. And a finely tooled one! Byington’s words elucubrated by Schwartzman’s rich varieties of mutter and mumble and banter are one of the genuine moviegoing treasures of a not-completely-half-bad year for emphatically idiosyncratic comedy. I laughed. A lot. And pretty much without reservation. With Eleanore Pienta, Alex Karpovsky, Tunde Adebimpe, Stephen Root. 76m. (Ray Pride)
“7 Chinese Brothers” opens Friday, September 4 at Facets. A trailer is below. Tell me you can resist Schwartzman here.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.
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