Clear History

A "Seinfeld" episode, with commercials deducted, was about 21 minutes long. Those shows always felt three-to-five minutes short, just slightly breathless, but, of course, leaving the viewer with an appetite for more. When "Seinfeld" expanded to an hour on special occasions -- for instance, the series final show -- the program was less successful. The viewer had more time to contemplate the rickety, if ingenious, structure of coincidences and collisions comprising the plot and the show's essential cynicism, it's famous meanspiritedness, became too overt and monotonous -- venom is best taken in small doses. "Clear History," a 2013 HBO film, is a Larry David vehicle that lasts about 100 minutes and, therefore, requires narrative strategies different from those used in "Seinfeld" or "Curb your Enthusiasm." The film is neither fish nor fowl and resembles some of Woody Allen's less successful movies -- it combines Larry David's characteristic abrasive comedy with a reasonably well-designed narrative that is fundamentally serious. Larry David plays an advertising executive who gets into a pointless fight with his boss (Jon Hamm) over naming an electric automobile. In a fit of picque, David's character (Nathan Flomm) quits the company just as it becomes fantastically successful. He is derided in the press and by late night TV comics as the man who threw away one billion dollars. Flomm retreats to Martha's Vineyard where he hides out for ten years. Then, the industrialist builds a huge mansion on the Vineyard, a sort of parody of Jim Gates' house in Washington, and Flomm plots his revenge, colluding with some zany locals to blow the place up. The plot has some interesting twists and turns and the narrative is structured around a concert by the geriatric band Chicago that is scheduled for the the island. (Chicago's music provides the soundtrack for the film and it is a shame that the concert, an event that has an organizing status in the movie equivalent to the hurricane in Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom" isn't more integral to the story.) Ultimately, the film's tenor is rather sentimental; the movie turns out to be about mortality and forgiveness and the community of people living on the island, would-be hermits who have nevertheless formed strong connections to one another -- a group of unpretentious people as remote as possible from the Beverly Hills types populating "Curb Your Enthusiasm" -- turns out to be the film's moral center. David undercuts the picture's pervasive nastiness -- there is a endlessly reiterated (unfunny) joke about David's ex-girlfriend "blowing" the band members of Chicago -- with the rather sweet and poignant story of the auto executive's search for Flomm so that he can pay him what is owed. (There is also a subplot about the mansion actually being a residential home for children with cancer -- but the movie "chickens out" with respect to that narrative thread and this part of the story goes nowhere; "Curb your Enthusiasm" would have been bolder in developing this aspect of the plot.) Unlike Woody Allen in some of his films, David is realistic about this limitations as a romantic lead. He thinks he can seduce Hamm's beautiful wife but when he kisses her, she spits at him with contempt. The movies has a ridiculously accomplished cast: Danny McBride, Eva Mendes, Philip Baker Hall, Bill Hader and Michael Keaton. But these luminaries are mostly wasted -- they underplay their parts to let Larry David shine and so their presence in the picture engenders a vague sense of disappointment. In fact, disappointment is probably a reasonable reaction to the film as a whole. Larry David's schtick as a hyper-sensitive and belligerent New York Jew navigating, or failing to navigate, the treacherous terrain of phony Hollywood "nice" doesn't really fit with most of this picture in which the local people are legitimately kind, forgiving, and well-meaning. The film is an interesting experiment, a transitional picture it seems, and mildly amusing. The central image in the film is two vehicles on a one-lane dirt path, neither willing to yield to the other -- this metaphor describes David's relationship to others and, perhaps, the film is autobiographical in some sense. Didn't David depart from "Seinfeld" just at the peak of its success?