TORONTO — Hey, “The Humans”? Where’s the humor?
The fun is what I missed most during the film adaptation of Stephen Karam’s phenomenal Broadway play, which premiered Sunday at the Toronto International Film Festival. Now, the whole thing leans pretentious.
It’s not that the writer’s very funny jokes were cut — they just don’t land. I’ve seen every major incarnation of the play, from its Chicago debut in 2014 to its Tony Award-winning Broadway run. Each time was an extremely well-rounded, unforgettable night of theater.
You laughed, you cried, you thought, you empathized, you called your mom after.
The new movie, mistakenly directed by the writer rather than an established filmmaker, is much more one-note and slight than the glorious show we saw on Broadway.
Yes, all of the performances are marvelous. Natural. Seismic. It’s the self-serious way they’re shot — Karam tends to fixate on one character for long gloomy stretches while everyone else chats around them — that takes what should be a multifaceted experience and render it into a static one. He seizes the story’s horror threads and sadness and gives a big “F you!” to the rest.
“The Humans” is a close-to-real-time look at a family’s Thanksgiving dinner in Lower Manhattan. Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) has just moved into a large, but grungy, Chinatown apartment, and her middle-class parents Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell) and Erik (Richard Jenkins), from Scranton, Pa., can’t help but comment on every flaw. The pipes, the thin walls, the creaky floors — an outrage! To anybody who pays obscene New York rent to live in a 100-year-old storage closet with a bunch of roaches, this is intensely relatable.
Also around the table are Brigid’s somewhat older boyfriend Richard (Steven Yeun), her sister Aimee (Amy Schumer) and their grandma Momo (June Squibb), who’s ailing from dementia. The casting is a dream.
Don’t get me wrong, there is still much to like. Karam’s script is superb. He writes one of the best, simplest explanations of the Middle American and Urban divide as turkey is about to be served. Deirdre is telling Richard, who will gain access to a trust fund in five years, about her and her husband’s recent cruise, and he innocently mocks ocean-liner vacations.
Embarrassed, Deirdre replies: “We like it because they take care of everything. You feel taken care of.”
It’s a missile of a line. As a hard-working office manager who raised two daughters on a low salary, she’s always been the one who does the caring — not the recipient.
Like she did onstage, Houdyshell runs away with the movie. The weary character fights like the dickens to stay positive as upsetting revelations come to light about her family. Even when it seems like Houdyshell isn’t doing much, she’s moving a mountain.
Jenkins is also excellent as an emotionally distant dad. He’s a master at playing the sort of men Hollywood forgets, like he did as a fast-food night manager in “The Last Shift.” He brings that same repressed anger here.
“The Humans” reminded me of another astounding play that didn’t resonate well as a movie: Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County,” starring Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts. That flick’s awkward dinner scene — a laugh riot onstage because live theater audiences need to pierce discomfort with noise — was a letdown, too.
Then I thought of Letts’ titanic Broadway turn as George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” another small play that found a visceral, successful life on screen in 1966 thanks to director Mike Nichols. “The Humans” has a terrific writer in Karam — what it needed was a Nichols.