Intended as a meta-joke – about mainstream movies, Hollywood neoliberalism, film festivals and Robert DeNiro’s career, to name the obvious targets – What Just Happened seems more like a Freudian slip. Rather than feature-length “State of the Industry” farce, storied producer Art Linson’s adaptation of his memoir falls into most of the patterns it means to parody.
DeNiro plays aging producer Ben, whose career is jeopardized over two weeks while he grapples with a bungled action thriller and a badly begun blockbuster. Substitute “actor” for “producer” in the previous sentence and you get how this movie could poke fun at DeNiro’s recent decline (especially after two weeks ago’s bungled DeNiro-Pacino thriller Righteous Kill). Foregoing such insight, What Just Happened reduces Hollywood’s current artistic and commercial crises to two easily manageable problems: containing a manic-depressive director’s (Michael Wincott) dire vision and shaving Bruce Willis’s ZZ Top-caliber facial hair and girth.
Another misstep – Levinson’s apparent poke at Hollywood sexism in casting Catherine Keener as a castrating exec – only underlines the film’s masculinism. Keener’s comic talents are wasted, and Robin Wright Penn is shockingly under-used as Ben’s ex-wife. As a “movie about the movies,” Levinson’s entry hesitates between the dark cynicism of Altman’s The Player and the trenchant silliness of Steve Martin’s Bowfinger, coming off like a bad Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. Bruce Willis provides the film’s best moments as a parody of himself, but DeNiro’s performance as his irrelevant self is the closest What Just Happened comes to real insight.
A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.
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