There’s nothing worse than watching people you admire show up in movies you immediately regret watching: Ben Kingsley in “The Love Guru,” Julianne Moore in “Seventh Son,” Viola Davis in “Suicide Squad.” Disasters like these make you wonder if their directors had something on their actors — a scandalous bargaining chip used to undeservingly leverage their skills for nefarious moviemaking ends. By contrast, “The Incredible Jessica James” won’t make you wonder at all. It’ll just make you cringe and wish for the sweet relief of the credits roll.
It hurts to write that sentence. “The Incredible Jessica James” is led by the incredible Jessica Williams, former senior correspondent on “The Daily Show,” and current co-hostess on “2 Dope Queens,” one of the best and most essential comedy podcasts worth listening to; the Williams of “2 Dope Queens” has passion, fire, timing, affability, charisma, a sharp tongue for making sharp observations about pop culture, human culture, the world we live in, and so, so much more. The Williams of “The Incredible Jessica James” has these qualities too, just in considerably smaller doses, which is a really cute way of saying that her presence on the screen is lesser than it is on the stage. This is Williams distilled into a character barely sketched out as an outline, much less a person, by the film’s writer/director James C. Strouse.
The tension of the film as art is found between Williams’ talent and Strouse’s lack of judicious editorial sense; “The Incredible Jessica James” dilutes its leading lady’s persona by design, but she’s still the best thing about the whole damn picture, shining regardless of how much she’s dulled by Strouse’s clumsy filmmaking. Any Jessica Williams is good Jessica Williams, but you’ll wish the film better served her gifts as an actress and comedian. It comes close. In this tale of two Jessicas, both have much in common, being funny, vibrant, and spirited types who live their lives rooted in pop culture and art. But Williams is self-possessed. James is possessed by Strouse. If Williams gives her shape in front of the camera, it’s Strouse behind the camera who plants her in an awkward atmosphere of stilted human interaction.
Every exchange made from one character to another feels graceless, if not on-the-surface rather than beneath it. There are gaps and delays between spoken lines, rarely immediately obvious but always apparent enough to sap the film of dialectic rhythm and stymying its pace. Movies like this can’t abide even one stumble, let alone a slew of them; they live on the agility of their banter, fluid speech being the glue that bonds the production. They live on characters, too, but let’s be fair: “The Incredible Jessica James” is loaded with characters. They’re limp characters, though, undefined beyond cutesy badinage and basic ambitions. Strouse forgets to give us any urgent need to invest in them, assuming that dreams and foibles are enough.
They aren’t. Look, there’s nothing wrong with frontloading comedies with charm, but charm alone can’t prop up a narrative. “The Incredible Jessica James” tries to run on on charm, and also on Williams’ star power, but the more time we spend waiting for Strouse to actually take us anywhere, the more that charm feels affected, and the more desperate the film grows for a reason to exist. Even the plot synopsis feels like it’s reaching. Jessica James teaches children’s theater workshop classes in Brooklyn and churns out plays by night, and then she falls in love with Chris O’Dowd playing a stock Chris O’Dowd character. He’s a sweet, goofy wiseass and an app inventor, and so far as we get to know him from the moment he meets Jessica to the moment the movie ends, that’s about all there is to him. We get why Jessica likes him. He’s a shallow, walking, ever-present romantic comedy trope.
As a rom-com, “The Incredible Jessica James” naturally deserves a trope allowance, but as a way of saying “thanks” for accepting those tropes, the movie should at least give its audience something fresh to compensate. Instead, Strouse adheres to standard rom-com qualifications, never bothering to take either the rom-com formula or his style anywhere new. Jessica, in the midst of getting over her ex-squeeze, Damon (Lakeith Stanfield), meets O’Dowd’s Boone, crushes on him, takes a series of blows to her ego as theater companies across New York City routinely reject her work, and eventually takes a trip back to her hometown to remind herself where she comes from and what kind of banal existence she wants to avoid (which is sort of a dick statement to make about the ‘burbs, but whatever).
And that’s it. That’s all there is. If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that “The Incredible Jessica James” only clocks in at about an hour and twenty minutes, but even at an hour and twenty minutes the film feels flabby — a series of sketches that demonstrate Williams’ potential as an actress and little else. The movie certainly doesn’t make Strouse feel any more essential as a voice in film; his kindness and humanity are welcome traits, but he doesn’t underlay them with craft or vision. (If there’s a word to describe his direction, both here and in the rest of his work, it’s “anonymous.”) In the end, “The Incredible Jessica James” tells us something we damn well knew already: that Williams is terrific. It’s nice to see someone affirm that in a feature film built around her, but it’d have been nicer if the feature film itself cared more. [D+]
