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If insanity is defined as doing the same thing
over and over and expecting a different result, a 38-year-old unknown still
trying to succeed as an actor certainly qualifies. Fake documentary confounds
autobiography and fiction as writer/director/actor Robert Margolis shepherds
viewers through Gotham streets on his daily rounds, from audition to
audition, from humiliation to humiliation. Margolis wears his heart on his
frayed sleeve in his unwavering belief that he was born to act. Brilliant,
audacious indie, a collaboration between Margolis and Swiss director Frank
Matter, has snagged awards wherever it has played and deserves a theatrical
shot. As Margolis has a wife (Kelli Barnett) and young son to support, his
infrequent thesping gigs and occasional employment as a dog-food telemarketer
are supplemented by handouts from his parents. But mom and dad have decided
to cut the umbilical purse strings. They, in concert with his increasingly
frustrated wife, urge Robert to get a "real" job and pursue his
acting career on the side. Such betrayal of his full-time calling horrifies our hero who, at least in
his own mind, is always on the verge of a breakthrough. Though it is tempting
to see the hero as a self-delusional loser, that interpretation begs the
question of whether the same is not true of anyone bucking the odds in quest
of a dream. Indeed, in many ways, "Insanity" plays like a
tragicomic, schlemiel-centered version of innumerable Hollywood sagas where
last-minute success reads in hindsight as heroic destiny. Certainly success in Margolis' and Matter's picture, like a
will-o'-the-wisp, beckons at every turn, only to be painfully (and
hilariously) snatched away. The play Robert has been in rehearsals for during
informal run-throughs actually gets funding for an Off Broadway opening, but
the playwright, who repeatedly assured Margolis that he was irreplaceable,
peremptorily dumps him for a "name." When a nervously hopeful, spruced-up Margolis shows up for a
long-anticipated meeting with a bigshot theatrical agent (real-life player
Bruce Levy), Levy's staff denies he has any such appointment. A screening of
a low-budget picture that Margolis headlined in (an actual Matter-directed,
Margolis-starring opus) draws an amazingly large crowd, except that 95% of
them are there to see the Fellini film upstairs. Meanwhile, a callow youth (Derek Johnson) whom Margolis has been mentoring
and preparing for the hard road ahead, effortlessly lands the lead role in a
sitcom. At low ebb, Margolis accepts the P.I. job his parents have been pushing, hanging
out on stakeouts with an experienced gumshoe and basking in the glory of his
first collar: a lost cat. But the Big Break, in the form of a small but juicy role in a Bogdanovich
film, waits in the wings, setting up the ultimate cosmic rug-puller. Margolis and Matter insinuate slight temporal shifts within the largely
chronological storyline: Scenes from play rehearsals with a changing cast
irregularly punctuate the narrative, and it becomes clear that the text is
probably written by Margolis and that it bears more than a passing
resemblance to events in his life. When a nurse interrupts a scene to usher off a suddenly catatonic actor,
the suggestion is made that insanity may be more than a metaphor for our
beleaguered hero. Matter's steady, hand-held DV camera, making
the most of outdoor New York locations, effortlessly keeps the fiction of
documentary alive without sacrificing composition or tonal control. The
almost desperate closeup complicity that Margolis creates with the camera
lends a ferocious ad lib immediacy to his running self-justifying commentary
that is as endearing as it is delusional, making him a more benign, smarter
Rupert Pupkin fated for documentable peculiarity instead of mass-media
stardom. |
