Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #218 Girlfriend's Day (2017)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
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Sometimes you don’t realize just how beloved someone is until they die and sometimes all it takes is a brush. That was the case recently with Bob Odenkirk, who was rushed to the hospital from the set of Better Call Saul after suffering a small heart attack.
Seemingly the sum of humanity, or at least a whole lot of people on Twitter came together to plead with a half-mad God who has taken so, so very much from us as of late, to not take our beloved Bob before his time.
We were wishing and praying and hoping out loud for Bob’s survival. As is often the case with online mourning, the thoughts and prayers quickly took on a weirdly performative aspect. Right wing troll Jack Posobiec nonsensically tried to turn the massive outpouring of goodwill that greeted the news of Odenkirk’s heart attack into a Culture War issue.
In a widely and rightfully mocked post, Posobiec sneered, “90 percent of Twitter bluechecks wouldn’t be able to last through a single episode of Mr. Show with Bob Odenkirk. Back when comedy was allowed to be funny.”
Posobiec’s bizarre brag that unlike the Woke brigade on Twitter, he has the mental strength to watch twenty-two minutes (or more!) of a genially absurdist, more or less apolitical sketch comedy program from the mid 1990s might make sense if Mr. Show was button-pushing edge lord shit but it most assuredly is not.
Also, I would be more impressed by Posobiec’s bona fides as an edgy, in your face Alt-Right Mr. Show super-fan if he got the name of the show he’s ostensibly so wild about right. It’s Mr. Show with Bob and David, David being David Cross, lefty comedian and actor.
As a real super-fan I spent a lot of time worrying about Odenkirk after Mr. Show ended and he lurched into the world of film with the back to back to back critical and commercial failures of Run, Ronnie, Run, Let’s Go to Prison and The Brothers Solomon.
Thankfully Odenkirk didn’t just make it through an extended journey through a creative wilderness intact: he re-invented himself as a dramatic actor in Better Call Saul and then Fargo, Little Women and Nebraska and emerged bigger and more important than ever. Jesus, from the way people were talking about Odenkirk, you’d think he was Tom Hanks lingering on death’s door in a coma.
That’s how it should be: people should consider Odenkirk a giant and a God and someone who has made a massive contribution to pop culture, an elder statesman of alt comedy. But the online game to assert who loved Odenkirk the most quickly became obnoxious, although Posobiec could have won it had he expressed affection for other Odenkirk projects like My Guy Sal, Little Ladies, Thursday Night Live, Oklahoma, Iowa City and What a Life!
Despite Pobosiec’s claim to being the ultimate Bob Odenkirk super-fan I very much doubt that he’s seen 2017’s Girlfriend’s Day, despite Odenkirk starring in it in addition to producing and co-writing the screenplay. If he had, Pobosiec would have bragged that Libs can’t possibly watch all 65 minutes of My Wife’s Holiday but that he was capable of such an extraordinary feat. Being a huge Bob Odenkirk fan and all.
In Girlfriend’s Day Bob Odenkirk plays Ray Wentworth, a greeting card writer who has been lost in a hazy fog of depression and ennui ever since his wife left him for a successful children’s book author played by Andy Richter.
Ah, but writing greeting cards is more than just a job for Ray. It’s something closer to an existential calling. Writing maudlin sentiments for every occasion isn’t something Ray does for money: it’s who he is on an existential level.
He’s the Bill Shakespeare of the Hallmark world, a romantic poet who specializes in lyrical succinctness. Girlfriend’s Day occupies a low-energy alternate universe where greeting cards are literally a matter of life and death, where they have the ability to bring broken people together and save lives.
It takes place in a world of greeting card bars and greeting card feuds and Chinatown-like secrets involving greeting cards and family secrets and an evil old patriarch played by the great Stacy Keach who is like John Huston’s Noah Cross only with greeting cards.
This doesn’t just take place in an absurdly greeting cards-themed world; it damn near takes place in the Greeting Card Galaxy.
The world that Girlfriend’s Day inhabits is as sad as it is absurd. The film opens with Ray losing his job and with it his identity and his will to live.
Three months later Ray is reduced to babysitting his landlord’s nephew and watching bum fights because, as he sadly confesses later on, watching the destitute batter each other in exchange for a hamburger or walking around money makes him feel better about his own sorry lot in life.
Then Ray gets a peculiar offer from an unexpected source. His old boss wants the former titan of the greeting card world to do some hush-hush, under-the-table, off-the-books work for him creating a card for a new holiday devoted to Girlfriends.
The competition to create the perfect card for the new holiday quickly turns deadly and Ray finds himself suddenly filled with inspiration and optimism when he falls in love with a quirky waitress played by Amber Tamblyn, the wife of Odenkirk’s Mr. Show compatriot David Cross.
Tamblyn’s love interest has a collection of ugly purses. In a film with a less sure grasp on a very tricky, very specific tone that easily could have come off as some Manic Pixie Dream Girl nonsense but director Michael Paul Stephenson, who had the surreal experience of starring in Troll 2 as a child and then directing Best Worst Movie, the wonderful documentary about the movie’s making and surreal afterlife lends the proceedings an air of deadpan under-statement that makes everything funnier and sadder.
As an unexpected but inspired leading man, Odenkirk has an innate gift for melancholy, for playing characters that are fundamentally overwhelmed and defeated by life but struggling to get by all the same.
When Odenkirk begins the film, “I’m a writer”, it feels like a confession pulled from somewhere deep in his soul. Sitting on his couch in his underwear, Odenkirk manages to invest the line, “Go, Shit-foot”, uttered hopefully if joylessly to his bum-fighter of choice, with vast oceans of sadness. Even the cat that Ray shares with his ex-wife has a palpable air of sadness about it, a bittersweet aura.
At sixty-five minutes, Girlfriend’s Day sometimes feels more like a super-sized short film than a proper motion picture but I dug it the first time around and I liked it even more upon a re-watch.
Odenkirk is an endlessly, effortlessly compelling screen presence and the script is full of quotable lines, like when Ray’s best friend reminds him, “You’re not an animal person, that includes humans.”
It’s a very strange movie, and a very silly movie and ultimately a very sad movie as well but if you are a real Bob-head, and not one of those pretenders like Posobiec you owe it to yourself to spend just over an hour catching up with a funky, funny little sleeper that’s a terrific vehicle for Odenkirk as an actor, writer and comic mind.
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