The Valet
Directed by Francis Veber
Francis Veber turns 70 this year, but he’s one of the youngest moviemakers in the world. Veber is a Frenchman who has been writing and directing dizzy, fizzy farces for 35 years–ever since the title character in The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe wandered cluelessly through a hornet’s nest of spies without ever learning that intelligence agencies around the world had mistaken him for the world’s greatest secret agent.
That movie was remade with a young Tom Hanks in the lead in 1985. It was the second of seven Veber films to be adapted by Hollywood, and the best you can say about it was that it was a little bit better than the first: The Toy, based on his Le Jouet, an absolutely horrible film featuring the made-in-hell pairing of Jackie Gleason and Richard Pryor. Hollywood has proved no kinder to Veber in the years since. His Les Compères became the dreadful Father’s Day with Robin Williams and Billy Crystal. Fugitifs was translated into the nightmarish Three Fugitives with Martin Short and Nick Nolte.
Veber’s lone writing and directing effort in English was My Father the Hero, the tale of a divorced father who poses as his own teenage daughter’s girlfriend. Maybe this deeply uncomfortable Oedipal joke would have worked in French–where they are, you know, cosmopolitan about these sexual matters. But in English? Cringe-inducing.
Only the outrageous La Cage Aux Folles managed to survive its Americanization into The Birdcage, with Miami substituting for Cap d’Antibes and Nathan Lane mincing memorably in the part of the drag queen who tries to pose as a real woman to provide his adopted son with a mother to show to his future in-laws at a dinner party where everything goes delightfully wrong.
If you’ve seen any of the American Veber movies (with the exception of The Birdcage) you will perhaps doubt my word when I tell you that he is a master–the world’s most consistently excellent comedy director. But he is.
The seemingly foolproof comic construction of Veber’s best work is what has attracted Hollywood time and again. But nobody in America seems capable of replicating the unpretentious yet masterly speed with which Veber unfurls his intricate tales. His movies are so breezy they almost seem to be improvised, and yet they function as smoothly as a Swiss watch. There’s no exposition, no character development. He plunges us straight into the middle of his story and lets us discover who the characters are and what makes them tick as his movies hurtle along to their breakneck conclusions. He tugs at our heartstrings for maybe 30 seconds every half-hour or so.
In Hollywood, of course, the heartstring-tugging goes on for minutes at a time, just so we can watch Robin Williams and Jackie Gleason turn all gooey and lovable. Such scenes destroy Veber’s farces by drenching their crispness in phony tears and making everything soggy.
Even now, Hollywood hacks are picking and scratching at Veber’s latest film, The Valet (just released here) in hopes of converting it into a vehicle for some lovable American. In The Valet, a billionaire industrialist is caught by a paparazzo arguing with his supermodel girlfriend on a Paris street just as our hero, a lowly valet parker at a restaurant near the Eiffel Tower, is walking by. The billionaire fears that his wife will divorce him, because most of his company’s stock is in her name. And so the valet parker, who appears in the paparazzo’s photograph, is paid off to act as though he is the supermodel’s boyfriend.
All this happens in the first seven minutes of The Valet, which should give you an idea of how efficiently Veber works. And there’s lots more plot to come. The twists and turns are entirely and happily unexpected, and the whole thing is over in 85 minutes.
This may be the one Veber movie that might make it in English, because there’s nothing especially Gallic about it. Turn the billionaire into a Donald Trump without a prenup, set it in Los Angeles instead of Paris, and everything else could remain exactly the same. Still, they’ll blow it. They always have and they always will.
Fortunately, no one has figured out how to crack the problem of turning Veber’s undisputed masterpiece, The Dinner Game (1998), into a Hollywood feature. Where else but in France would you be able to make a movie about a bunch of self-infatuated intellectuals who have a club devoted to humiliating people they deem stupid? Every month one of these intellectuals finds a hobby-obsessed moron, seduces him into thinking he’s brilliant and fascinating, and brings the moron to dinner so that everyone can make relentless fun of him. They get their just deserts at the unknowing hands of the dumbest, most ridiculous moron ever to be invited.
The Dinner Game is one of the few movies to which I would affix the word “perfect.” There isn’t a moment that should be cut, a line that should be edited, a performance that could be improved. It’s not the funniest movie ever made, though it’s hilarious. There’s nothing remotely significant or meaningful about it, though one is tempted to celebrate it because of the way it pricks the balloon of French self-regard. But it is perfect. Which is why you should put The Dinner Game in your Netflix queue right this second.
As for The Valet, if it’s playing anywhere near you, find a way to see it. It will make you feel better about France for a minute, the way Sarkozy’s election did.
John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
