She's Funny That Way (2015)

Peter Bogdanovich's She's Funny That Way arrives as a curious artifact, a screwball comedy assembled in 2013 and released, after distributors hesitated, in 2015. Owen Wilson plays a Broadway director who pays a call girl thirty thousand dollars to abandon her trade and pursue acting, a premise the film treats as an act of generosity. The plot braids together therapists, private investigators, jealous spouses, and a judge with a wandering eye, all converging on one Italian restaurant and one table read. It is the kind of farce where doors open and close at precise intervals and nobody learns anything of consequence.

Consider what the film declines to do. Its cast is white, its concerns are romantic, and its moral universe begins and ends with who is sleeping in whose hotel room. There is no commentary on the industry that employs these people, no reckoning with the economics of the sex work it depicts so breezily, no gestures toward identity, environment, or the redistribution of wealth. Bogdanovich wrote the script with Louise Stratten in the late nineties, and it shows. The sensibility belongs to a man who sincerely believed that writing a check to a working girl constituted a rescue.

Jennifer Aniston, Imogen Poots, and Kathryn Hahn do what they can with material that asks them to be desirable, confused, or both. The film's most radical proposition is that a woman might enjoy her own misadventures. In 2015 this registered as nostalgia. Today it registers as taxidermy: a charming specimen of an earlier era, preserved, glassy-eyed, and incapable of commenting on the world that produced it. We classify it accordingly. It means no harm. It also has nothing to say, which for our purposes amounts to the same verdict.