# Impostors, The (1998)

### reviewed by
Scott Renshaw

THE IMPOSTORS (Fox Searchlight) Starring: Stanley Tucci, Oliver Platt, Alfred Molina, Tony Shalhoub, Campbell Scott, Lili Taylor, Steve Buscemi, Hope Davis. Screenplay: Stanley Tucci. Producers: Beth Alexander and Stanley Tucci. Director: Stanley Tucci. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, adult themes, sexual situations) Running Time: 102 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

It has long been one of my most closely-held dramatic axioms that there is no middle ground when it comes to the execution of farce. Either a writer and director get it, or they don't. If they get it, the result is exhilarating comic brilliance. If they don't get it, the result is nearly unendurable. And never, I believed, could the twain meet.

Another false dichotomy bites the dust. Writer/director Stanley Tucci's THE IMPOSTORS is old-fashioned farce that floats along amusingly, yet only occasionally hits the high notes that turn chuckles into gut-busters. Tucci and Oliver Platt star as a pair of struggling 1930s actors named Arthur and Maurice who, through a tortuous series of events, end up as inadvertent stowaways on the luxury liner U.S.S. Intercontinental. They've been pursued and accused of assault by egomaniacal thespian Jeremy Burtom (Alfred Molina) -- who also turns out to be a passenger on the ship -- but Burtom becomes the least of their worries. A pair of con artists (Richard Jenkins and Allison Janney) plot to seduce and kill two wealthy passengers, the first mate (Tony Shalhoub) plots to blow up the ship as a political statement, and an ambiguously sexual tennis pro (Billy Connolly) plots to make Maurice his "savage gypsy lover."

It's a classic screwball farce set-up, which Tucci cleverly chooses to place in the classic screwball farce era of the 1930s. Opening with a great bit of pantomime accompanying the opening credits, Tucci establishes Arthur and Maurice as protagonists in the mold of the classic silent film comedians -- lovable losers, not above a bit of duplicity if it suits their purposes, yet ultimately heroic (and, in particular, chivalric). The pre-shipboard scenes, though little more than isolated comedy sketches, do a nice job of showing the chemistry between the two. By the time the Intercontinental hits the open sea, Tucci and Platt's starving, utterly sincere artistes have generated plenty of good will.

I was ready for THE IMPOSTORS to soar once Arthur and Maurice began dashing from stateroom to stateroom; instead, it levels off at a pleasant cruising altitude. Tucci populates the ship with plenty of goofy characters -- a fascistic head steward (Campbell Scott), a suicidal entertainer incongruously named Happy (Steve Buscemi), a wallflower heiress (Hope Davis), a deposed monarch-in-hiding (Isabella Rossellini) -- clearly intended to make Arthur and Maurice look like the sane ones in a sea of chaos. Yet he doesn't allow these characters to function in scenes that build comic momentum. Tucci's gags are mostly of the hit-and-run variety. While there are a few admittedly hilarious ones, they seem like wasted opportunities to do what great farce does best: have each comic moment draw from the previous comic moment, and lead into the next comic moment, in a hysterically unstoppable domino effect.

Those missed opportunities are most evident when Tucci _does_ allow a scene to build momentum. In one brilliantly unpredictable moment, Maurice hides under the bed while foreign radical Shalhoub radios his superiors, the sub-title translations for Shalhoub's dialogue becoming an ever-more-bizarre bit of business. In a later scene, a tracking shot through the ship's dance floor eventually catches Rossellini, who quickly hides her face from the camera. Such fourth wall-breaking captures farce at its anything-for-a-laugh finest. More often, Tucci goes for the gentle touch which worked so well in BIG NIGHT. As frisky and unpretentious a comedy as THE IMPOSTORS is, it traffics in an unnecessarily restrained level of lunacy. Tucci's spin on MONKEY BUSINESS has plenty of funny business, but it doesn't let anarchy reign quite as often as it should. It's that rarest of comedic animals: the merely-good farce.

         On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 farce sides:  7.

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