Elizabeth Banks is one of those stars that always seems to come near greatness but never quite reaches it. She reminds me of Debby Reynolds or Joan Collins vs. Elizabeth Taylor. Or in the more modern version: Jennifer Aniston vs. Angelina Jolie.
That isn’t to say she’s bad, nor either Debby, Joan or Jennifer, only that something gets in the way in almost everything she does. In this case, I think it’s the script. I certainly enjoyed the movie, and some people in the row behind me whooped because they liked it so much. But the movie is like its setting: Los Angeles. And although, (skin deep), it’s a story about dueling estheticians, the real story is about the deep and unexamined paranoia that most people live with. People would rather deal with their skin conditions than understand what is actually going on in their hearts and minds.
The Californians on Saturday Night Live kind of tackled this human condition when Fred Armison, for example, would walk in on Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig kissing and keep talking about how he had picked up some tangerines from a guy on the off ramp of the 405 freeway, and then, practically a minute later, seems to realize that “Devon” is kissing his girlfriend. Every episode of their soap opera satire ended with all the characters looking in the mirror, as if they were trying to see themselves but were unable to. That’s what this movie is, but with much less humor, and the movie was criticized by the few places that reviewed it, for not being enough of a satire — not being funny enough. But I think that any more humor would have completely missed the point.
She never misses an opportunity to see what she would look like if the space between her eyebrows were raised just a tiny bit. The movie opens and closes with extreme and repulsive closeup of her putting on her makeup. In the opening sequence it’s preparing for a television appearance. In the final sequence it’s to surrender to the police. But that’s sort of where the problem lies. You have an unreliable lead character. And someone somewhere once said you can’t write about a crazy person because nobody wants to spend time in the mind of a crazy person. It’s that strange contradiction about most story telling. The funniest stories are about people whose lives are in danger. Slapstick comedy is about desperation to get away from the police for example, or get away from a killer. The sitcom may be funny, but its structure is actually the structure of a tragedy. Every week we come back to the same people making the same stupid mistakes and ending up in a worse place then they were at the start of the half hour. How many times did Lucy screw up? But we laugh.
This near miss, I would call it, was good in the sense that she was absolutely right about being paranoid: she just had the wrong person. I’m not going to write more about this. I enjoyed the movie, but like most Elizabeth Banks pictures, it’s slightly off. I think her best performance was probably in People Like Us, from 2012, starring with Chris Pine.
She’s also one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood.