Stanley Tucci's Glorious 1998 Throwback Slapstick Comedy The Impostors Is the Best Wes Anderson Movie Wes Anderson Never Made
Now THAT’S a cast!
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.
I’ve been cranking out Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entries for so long that I sometimes lose sight of the beautiful, idealistic purity at its core. People who choose a Control Nathan 4.0 movie for me to watch feel so passionately about a specific film that they’re willing to pay me between seventy five and one hundred dollars to experience it for myself and then share my thoughts with the world.
Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 can feel like a heavy burden because there are so many to get through and never enough time but I adore it all the same because it makes this site possible and also because it allows me to play passionate evangelist on behalf of the art and trash that I love.
Patrons often choose bad movies for me to tear apart as well but as I have dedicated my life and career to illustrating, celebrating bad movies can be every bit as joyful and communal an experience as gushing about the all-time greats.
Of course there’s no way of knowing how I will feel a particular piece of entertainment. You might choose a movie for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 because you adore it and I might despise it.
I really hope that the kind patron who paid me to watch and write about all of Oliver Stone’s movies did not expect me to lavish praise upon the bad boy auteur because watching ALL of Stone’s movies only confirmed that I despise, with my signature white-hot burning passion, the man, his films and his whole deal.
I’m very grateful that I ended up loving two shows that patrons paid me to experience in their entirety, Batman Beyond and Freakazoid! because it would be a goddamn slog writing up every episode of a show you hate.
I suppose it’s not surprising that patrons kind enough to give me money and encouragement, two things I desperately need at this point, and every other stage of my life, would choose movies for this column that they thought I would like or, at the very least, enjoy trashing.
That’s certainly true of 1998’s The Imposters, which I vaguely recall seeing and possibly reviewing a lifetime ago, at the very beginning of my career as a professional pop culture writer but otherwise remember almost nothing about.
I am pleased to report that I didn’t just like The Impostors: I fucking love it. It is pure joy, an old-fashioned romp with one of the greatest casts in film history.
That might seem like hyperbole and a half but, in addition to starring the delightful comedy team of Stanley Tucci and Oliver Platt, the new, improved Stan & Ollie, The Imposters stars Campbell Scott, Tony Shalhoub, Steve Buscemi, Richard Jenkins, Allison Janney, Hope Davis, Billy Connolly, Arden Myrin, Alfred Molina, Dana Ivey, Isabella Rossellini, Lili Taylor and an uncredited Woody Allen.
When The Imposters shows off pretty much its entire cast in the same shot or scene, something it does more than once, it feels like writer-director-star-all-around-delight Stanley Tucci is showing off. Why shouldn’t he? He attracted a once-in-a-lifetime cast and gave them all plum roles.
The exception is Billy Connolly, who has the misfortune to lustily embody that most regrettable if ubiquitous of comic tropes: gay panic. The sole joke of Connolly’s role and performance is that he’s a gay man who REALLY loves having gay sex but Connolly commits to the role with delirious abandon. He doesn’t redeem this loathsome cliche but he’s clearly having a blast playing a man who feels no need to mask his all-consuming horniness to appeal to the delicate sensibilities of the time.
I’m in the perfect space to appreciate a movie like The Imposters because I am watching a LOT of old slapstick comedies for The Fractured Mirror and lots of movies about the all-important shift from silent to sound film.
So I’ve never been more in tune with The Imposters’ delicate sensibility. Tucci’s overlooked masterpiece hearkens back to the age of Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello while feeling like a lost Wes Anderson movie.
Tucci and Platt play Arthur and Maurice respectively. They’re starving actors who have not let a complete lack of talent and success keep them from being raving egotists. They’re adorably, hilariously abysmal actors onstage and off, shameless hams for whom too much is never enough.
The perfectly cast leads are playing characters they began developing while matriculating at Yale. They have the dynamite chemistry of a longtime comedy team. It’s as if they’re one organism with two brains, two impossibly expressive faces and two bodies working in perfect unison.
It’s precisely because Platt and Tucci are such brilliant men and gifted actors that they are so wonderfulyl convincing playing complete maroons who are also TERRIBLE would-be thespians.
They’re perfectly matched by Alfred Molina as their personal and professional nemesis Sir Jeremy Burtom. Burton is a drunken, narcissistic ham in the John Barrymore mold but he is as undeservedly successful as Arthur and Maurice are rightly desperate and obscure.
In its early going The Impostors feels like a series of inspired, stand-alone short films, the kind you might see in 1937 before a newsreel and a double feature. In my favorite scene in a movie full of them, our bumbling heroes decide to con their way into finagling delicious desserts to help with their hunger pains.
They decide that Maurice will sample the baker’s goods and insult them. Then Arthur will stroll in and vigorously defend the man, who will be so grateful that he’ll happily reward him with a “cornucopia of delicacies” as a reward. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Instead the duo gets hopelessly confused and the roles become reversed.
After briefly praising the man Arthur begins insulting the poor baker relentlessly, leading Maurice to begin defending him. It’s a master class in acting and reacting with a perfect button. The baker DOES end up giving one of the men a treat for defending him, but it’s Maurice, who obliviously requests the very pastry that he had previously insulted.
The baker instead gives Maurice two tickets to see Sir Jeremy Bertram play Hamlet. This leads, in a roundabout way, to the desperate actors accidentally stowing away on a ship whose passenger list inconveniently happens to include Molina’s perpetually apoplectic theatrical superstar.
The Impostors gave a sense of what a Wes Anderson movie on a boat would feel like a good half decade before The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
The boat is a character in itself filled with unforgettable people like the ironically named Happy Franks (Steve Buscemi), a sad-eyed crooner who falls into a suicidal depression after his wife leaves him yet must sing songs of love all the same.
If you’ve ever wanted to see Buscemi play a despondent Frank Sinatra and sing “The Nearness of You”, here’s your chance. Lili Taylor is typically terrific as a ferociously competent professional who takes pity on our heroes and Richard Jenkins and Allison Janney are a hoot as American con artists badly but successfully pretending to be French.
The Impostors doesn’t really need a plot, or stakes, or conflict, or danger even. I would be content just watching these delightful goofs be silly but in its third act our hapless heroes are called upon to save the ship as a whole and several of its passengers when they accidentally end up acquiring crucial information.
They discover that a crazed terrorist played by Tucci’s Big Night co-director Tony Shalhoub is planning on setting off a bomb that will destroy the ship and that Janney and Jenkins’ grifters have murder as well as larceny on their minds.
The Impostors made me so happy that I wanted it to be merely the first in a series of retro vehicles for Oliver Platt and Stanley Tucci. Instead it’s a glorious one-off that deserves to be seen and savored and re-watched over and over and over again.
I am so glad that I was forced to watch this wonderful movie and that you patrons and readers are so very kind to me when it comes to choosing these movies and supporting the site and my silly but sometimes secretly sacred-seeming endeavors
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