Top Five

Top Five (2014) is an ambitious film directed by the comedian, Chris Rock.  It's a big, vivid picture, chronicling one day in the life of its hero, a comedian and film maker named Andre Allen -- he's called "Dre" by his friends.  The film scrambles time, uses a complex series of flashbacks and flashforwards, all of this jump-cut for a ragged, jangly effect.  Dre's career is in trouble.  His fans are annoyed by his recent pictures, particularly an earnest film about a slave-uprising in Haiti called Uprize!  Interviewers plead with the director to return to making audience-pleasing "funny films" and Dre has to contend with a legion of admirers who want him to return to producing pictures in the "Hammy the Bear" series -- a raunchy violent comedy franchise featuring Dre dressed-up as a gun-toting Teddy Bear.  Dre's agent has arranged for the celebrity to be married on live TV to a reality show star, upcoming nuptials about which the protagonist seems understandably anxious.  Top Five follows Dre through a day and a night -- he grants interviews and promotes, unsuccessfully, Uprize!, a film that is tanking at the box-office, and, finally, attends a much-hyped bachelor party with fellow comedians (a sullen-looking Jerry Seinfeld and morose Adam Sandler, with a grim-looking Whoopie Goldberg), before jetting off to the West Coast, presumably to be married. An interview with a comely lady-journalist provides both an occasion for romance and a framework for autobiographical vignettes.  Dre's life is complicated by the fact that he is a recovering alcoholic, committed to the AA notion of "rigorous honesty," and on the verge of relapse.  The film's romantic interest, the lady journalist, is also a reformed drunk and committed to a doomed relationship with a homosexual man -- in the course of the film, she abandons journalistic objectivity (under a pseudonym she has previously panned Dre's Uprize!) and embarks on an affair with the comedian.  The film has a large and voluble supporting cast, including J.B. Smoove, as Dre's unctuous, chubby-chasing agent, Tracy Morgan and Cedric the Entertainer, as a Houston pimp and impresario.  The flashbacks involve lots of drinking and drug use together with graphically portrayed sexual encounters.  Somehow, the movie, although frantic and crammed with witty dialogue, doesn't quite succeed.  And the film doesn't successfully emerge from the shadow of two pictures on which it is modeled -- first, the movie is obviously a homage to Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (the film in which Allen is repeatedly berated for no longer making funny movies); indeed, Andre's surname, "Allen", makes the reference clear.  Top Five refers to the characters' penchant for making lists of their "top five" favorite comedians or musical acts -- also a reference to the list of things that make life worth living recited by Woody Allen in the one of the final scenes of Manhattan.  (Since, Allen's Stardust Memories was itself derived from Fellini's 8 1/2, Chris Rock's film has something of the pallid quality of a copy of a copy.)  Second, the film's structure is derived from Spike Lee's somber picture about a convicted Wall Street banker roaming the streets of Manhattan before turning himself in for a five-year prison sentence, The 25th Hour.  Both movies are largely set in the New York neighborhoods, use semi-documentary film making techniques, and seem to show a series of events unfolding in something approximating real time.  Unfortunately, Top Five can't quite compare with the pictures that it invokes -- it's good, but not as good as it should be.  Furthermore, Top Five is predictable -- references to Cinderella play out in the scenes final images more or less as we expect -- and the picture is compromised:  it's open-ended but not so open-ended as to be honestly ambiguous and the sequence in which Rock returns to his roots, performing some good raunchy stand-up comedy in a cellar club in the Village, is not as hilarious as the film represents it to be.  Comedy shouldn't rely on reaction shots to make its points and the stand-up routine, supposedly representing Dre's redemption and integrity, is riddled with close-ups telling us when to laugh and how hard.