‘I Don’t Understand You’ is Hit or Miss (Mostly Miss)
The deadly unfunny dark comedy "I Don't Understand You" misses the mark in its tale of a gay couple's Italian vacation gone wrong.
Dark comedy done well can be so delicious. It takes a certain alchemy to lace tales of death and desperation with unabashed humor, but the Coen Brothers hit the target dead-center with Fargo, and then off to the side with Burn After Reading.
Danny DeVito, when he was directing movies, nailed the tone of black comedy with the homicidal shenanigans in Throw Momma from the Train, then again by pushing a divorcing couple off a proverbial cliff in The War of the Roses. In that bitter anti-romance, the jokes, both achingly sad and viciously funny, cut deeper the bleaker the Roses’ battle becomes.
Sometimes, the more absurdly dark, the sharper the comedy, as in the body horror of last year’s The Substance and A Different Man, or the gang of dithering leaders in Kubrick’s apocalyptic but hilarious Dr. Strangelove fighting in the War Room before dropping the bomb.
When the tone hits right, and the humor’s landing, characters in a good dark comedy can get away with murder. Dom and Cole, the accident-prone, well-to-do married gay couple at the center of I Don’t Understand You are not in a good dark comedy.
City mice Dom and Cole — portrayed by Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells, credible as partners in life and crime — are vacationing in Italy, and causing havoc. Their general m.o. is to try to cover up the unintended havoc they cause, and, usually, failing that, end up causing worse catastrophes.
Circumstances spiral out of their control, and more than one unlucky soul meets their maker, ha, ha, ha. The formula for escalating peril and fatal mishaps seems sound, but writer-directors Brian Crano and David Joseph Craig, a real-life married couple, woefully misjudge the humor.
The film crosses the delicate line between sublimely ridiculous and just dumb too often in the wrong direction, pursuing the premise that these privileged gays don’t speak or understand a word of Italian, and don’t really try to bridge that divide.
They just keep speaking English to people who can’t understand them, or not listening to the Italian speakers trying to be understood. The couple’s language limitations lead constantly to awkward miscommunication and mishaps, like the series of inadvertent occurrences that get a kind old Italian lady killed.
On an excursion from Rome to a countryside restaurant recommended by a friend, Dom and Cole’s encounter with the elderly proprietress, Zia Luciana (Nunzia Schiano, giving the film’s most amusing performance), ends in her unfortunate demise. She deserves better than what her guests try to pull off in order to conceal her death.
But, as Dom insists in their defense, they’re just “two hapless tourists” resolving to do what’s necessary to save their hides. It so happens their actions dig them deeper in a hole, especially after the unexpected arrival of another local, Massimo, played by The Gilded Age robber baron Morgan Spector.
Massimo is no master of industry, but rather, as far as this story is concerned, an inconvenient buffoon, rendered broadly by Spector, in the zany spirit of a Mel Brooks comedy. Massimo speaks a little English, so he’s got a leg up on the Americans, but then they can’t understand him because of his thick accent.
For people whose vacation is spiraling past disaster, Dom and Cole should try harder to listen with their brains. It might be funnier and more convincing. Yet, the movie commits wholly to the (true) stereotype of entitled Americans abroad insisting on using only English with the locals and paves no other lane of comedy.
The sight gags and slapstick are hit or miss, despite the agile cinematography by Lowell A. Meyer (Knock at the Cabin). And, tonally, the film doesn’t strike a favorable balance between goading us to be aghast at what these guys are willing to do, and rooting for them to make it home. On this point, the movie saves its most off-key gag for last.
Dom and Cole aren’t just desperate to get safely out of Italy, they also long to start a family. As depicted in the film’s first act, they’ve already tried to adopt and so far have been let down painfully. But just before their trip, they found hope in prospective new mom Candace (Amanda Seyfried, in a cameo) considering them as adoptive parents for the baby she’s carrying.
They’d do anything to get back home for this amazing opportunity. They might even kill to be dads — and no innocent foreigner should stand in the way of their ultimate happiness, right? Insert your Obnoxious American joke here.
I Don’t Understand You (★★☆☆☆) is Rated R and is playing in theaters nationwide including the Regal Majestic in Silver Spring, Md. Visit www.fandango.com.
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