Top Five
I wanted so to enjoy Chris Rock’s Top Five. Top Five is sporadically funny. It’s also both needlessly over the top raunchy and grasping to be artful; attempting to appeal to those who just want a crass time at the movies and also to lovers of film. It’s a divided, contradictory aesthetic and Top Five doesn’t successfully survive the tug of war.
Writer, director and star Rock plays Andre Allen, a standup comedian and actor trapped, like Michael Keaton’s Riggan Thomson in Birdman, in his audience’s perception of him and the insipid roles he’s performed. Like Riggan Thomson, he’s also attempting to redeem himself by creating a work of art (about a Haitian slave uprising) which will alienate his core audience but maybe get him critical attention (“I don’t feel funny anymore”, he says). Like Birdman, Top Five also takes place in about 24 hours, in New York, with a roving, fluid camera. Considering the core themes of these two concurrent films, it seems the frustration of having to play ball according to the industry’s rules was a rising concern among Hollywood royalty.
Andre Allen is, during the same day, also scheduled to be married to a reality TV star he obviously doesn’t love (Gabrielle Union) and is followed around all day by a NY Times reporter, Chelsea Brown (Rosario Dawson), a beautiful young professional much more suited for Allen. You can probably tell, as I did within five minutes, where this is all going. There aren’t many surprises here; Top Five‘s plot is too schematic for that.
Top Five is also too derivative. The romantic comedy plot devices were overused decades ago. From Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1942) it takes the device of a comedian wanting to make relevant (i.e. preachy and heavy handed) films. Rock’s film even features an epiphanic scene set in The Comedy Cellar showing the healing power of laughter which parallels the Sullivan’s Travels scene in which a chain gang forgets its troubles and gets lost in the joys of a silly Walt Disney cartoon. Andre Allen parallels Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980) (the hounded star who no longer feels funny and wants to make serious films). Top Five‘s romantic complications are all drawn from the Frank Capra movies It Happened One Night (1934) and Meet John Doe (1941). The scenes we all know where the naive hero finds out Jean Arthur was (at first) a cynical fake who was just exploiting him – and the couple (temporarily) breaks up? That’s here, too.
It’s possible for a film about film to get away with such things, in the form of homage. Top Five is a film about the love of art, with homages to Chaplin and past comics and top five lists of favorite musicians. Perhaps the best scene in the film is a trip back home to old friends, performed by Rock’s real comedic peers (Michael Che, Tracy Morgan, Sherri Shepherd, Jay Pharoah, Leslie Jones); it has a joy and real, improvised life to it. Likewise, a short scene of Andre attempting to jump rope is a delight.
But then there’s the other half of the film, obsessed with sexual functions, stultifyingly at odds with the City Lights atmosphere Top Five reaches for. Adam Sandler, Jerry Seinfeld and Whoopi Goldberg make embarrassing cameos in one of the last scenes, a bachelor party in a stripper’s club. Apart from Sandler and Seinfeld looking depressingly older, Goldberg looks ashamed to be there, half covering her face.
Wanting to create lasting work is an honorable pursuit. My advice to Chris Rock would be that if he really wants to create great art (which doesn’t mean a work can’t be funny – far from it) he needs to dig deeper, be more original, less meta and less trashy. I’d spend my money on that.
—Michael R. Neno, 2019 Mar 26