The Great Buck Howard

Mourning the death of Raul Ruiz, I noticed a film on Showtime starring John Malkovitch. Malkovitch played an important role in Ruiz' film of Proust's Time Regained, a character that he was born to play, a perverse French nobleman; Malkovitch also starred in Ruiz' biopic about Gustav Klimt. So, as a misguided homage to Ruiz (none of his films are available to be seen), I watched the Showtime film, The Great Buck Howard (2008 - Sean McGinly). The movie is surprisingly intriguing, very well acted, and compelling. I never heard of this movie and had not read any reviews. The Great Buck Howard, apparently, premiered at Sundance and, then, vanished after a disappointing theatrical release -- but the film is the kind of picture that seems designed for Cable TV, a diversion that is well enough made and acted to attract the attention of discerning viewers. This sort of picture, a gentle, slightly didactic Bildungs-film, can't compete with the gore, spectacle, and excess of most theatrical pictures -- but cable TV on mid-week is the film's true milieu and I predict that many people will stumble upon the movie, as I did, and like it. The Great Buck Howard is ostensibly about a Mentalist (a combination magician and hypnotist who calls his tricks "effects") modeled after the Great Kreskin. Malkovitch plays the Mentalist supported by Tom Hanks, Ricky Jay, and Steve Zahn (there are a host of cameos by minor TV and vaudeville personalities). Anything with Ricky Jay and Steve Zahn is pretty much guaranteed to be fascinating. (Zahn is one of the reasons to watch the HBO show about post-Katrina New Orleans, Treme -- a series that otherwise doesn't do much of anything). The movie chronicles the adventures of an earnest young man who becomes Buck Howard's road manager, meets a girl, and learns various life-lessons from the great, but forgotten, performer (Buck Howard is like Kreskin, formerly a staple on the Johnny Carson show) but now ignored by everyone and playing venues like Bakersfield and Akron (and Wausau, Wisconsin)). Buck Howard gets a big break in Cinncinati when he hypnotizes 900 people at one time, but, unfortunately, the press is distracted away from his "effect" by a minor accident in which Jerry Springer is slightly injured. Since the film is about the education of a young man, it is modestly didactic: the movie is all about banal, but important things, like being true to yourself, following your dreams, and perservering in doing what you love. The hero has quit Law School to manage Buck Howard's tour, to the dismay and horror of his father played by Tom Hanks -- apparently, the young man Conlon Hanks, in Tom Hanks' actual son. Every moral that the film teaches is valid and important and I was touched by the film's kind heartedness and naive good will. I'm pretty jaded and didn't quit law school to follow my dreams; I've never been true to myself, never had the courage to strike out on my own, and have persevered but not in doing what I love. But still, at the wretched end of my life, these simple messages resonate with me. (The film, which is interesting and engaging as a story, well-written, but not at all noteworthy as a film -- it is totally conventional -- of course, is pretty much the antipodes of most of Ruiz' work).