An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn

An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn

Making good absurdist cinema is much harder than it appears. This movie, though an attempt at absurdism, becomes instead a boggy wallow in affectation; this fact is all too plain.

Directed by Jim Hosking from a script he co-wrote with David Wike, this competently assembled feature opens in what looks like a retro coffee shop; its male employees wear suits that look like. I can’t even remember anymore double-knits, maybe? and wide ties of the kind I hadn’t seen since my own father was working as an engineer. But then the coffee shop is advertising a new “Mid-Winter Blend,” and that kind of artisanal marketing wasn’t really happening in the 1970s or ’80s so when exactly are we?

I don’t want to make it sound as if I’m expressing genuine frustration at these questions as I take in the deliberately stilted acting by Emile Hirsch, Aubrey Plaza, Sky Elobar and Zach Cherry in this scene. The circumscribed world Hosking creates here is deliberately unfixed in terms of period, just as the situations and dialogue are contrived for a particular feeling of unreality. Hirsch’s coffee-shop manager character is named “Shane Danger,” and after a human-resources guy representing the “Bob’s” chain of which this coffee shop is part tells him he’s got to lay off one person, Shane fires his wife Lulu (Plaza).

Discussing with his two remaining employees how they’re going to weather the storm of a shrinking business, Shane says “I think positive all the time. Okay, I have to take a shit. Can you guys watch the shop for 25 minutes?” On his departure, the guys wonder why he needs 25 minutes.

Although Lulu tells Shane she doesn’t hold her firing against him personally there remains something wrong with their marriage, which becomes evident when Lulu finds out about an upcoming stage engagement of one Beverly Luff Linn “for one magical night.” A look through the photos in her underwear drawer show her and Luff Linn in amorous clinches. She’s got a past.

Then Shane and his buddies rob the convenience store of Lulu’s brother (played by Sam Dissanayake). After this, seeing that money again is a priority for Lulu’s brother; to that end he hires the rather shy and almost recessive gunman, or maybe the more accurate term is man who owns a gun, Colin. In any case he confronts Colin with the situation and then sends him after the cash box to the hotel where Beverly Luff Linn (a very prosperous looking Craig Robinson) is staging his magical night. Colin is besotted with Lulu but she’s all business, whatever that business actually is. As for Mr. Luff Linn himself, he is in the company of a male manager/partner who looks after his every need, and greets everything with guttural grunts and growls. Is he some kind of Frankenstein’s monster? Or just very hungry?

There are many tries at Lynch here, from the way certain performances are stylized to the fake wood-grain paneling of motel-room walls. Some silly literalism, too a hotel bar called the Seafarer’s Lounge overseen by a bartender in a ship Captain’s hat, for instance. But “An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn” doesn’t just fail to provoke laughter of either the raucous or nervous varieties; it never comes within shouting distance of approximating anything like Lynchian uncanniness.

I can see why someone would think it might. For example, Jemaine Clement’s Colin retrieving his gun from his car before he approaches the Danger house is as unlikely and potentially interesting a character as, say, Tim Roth and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s snacking assassins in Lynch and Mark Frost’s 2017 television series “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Yet there’s no numinosity in Hosking’s representation. It is the distinction between truly idiosyncratic vision and a compulsion toward difference.

But also it is something easier to measure; simply that Lynch knows how to speak film language on all levels infinitely better than Hosking does. Talentless genius often fails. But non-genius talent fails more frequently. All that said: Plaza and Clement are both charismatic screen presences whose charisma makes this failure watchable where under other casting circumstances it might not have been so much fun to sit through the movie’s credits.

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