Movie review: 'Man in the Chair'

Christopher Plummer in "Man in the Chair" (Credit: Outsider)

2 1/2 stars (out of four)

In its bare particulars, “Man in the Chair” sounds like a treacly uplift film, exactly the kind of warm family fare that people flock to around the holidays: A poor boy with a troubled family (Michael Angarano) loves film and wants to make his own student movie in order to earn a film-school scholarship, but it looks like a rich boy with all the breaks will win out instead. So he seeks the help of a lonely, forgotten old man (Christopher Plummer) who used to crew films for Orson Welles. The old crank enlists everyone at his film-crew retirement home  for one last great cinematic hurrah. The boy gets his film, the lonely old man gets a friend, the sad husks at the retirement home get a purpose, the stuck-up rich boy gets shown up and everyone lives happily ever after. Right?

Well, not so much. Writer-director Michael Schroeder doesn’t entirely steer clear of sentimentality, and his story has a distinct “Karate Kid” vibe. But he takes it in grim directions, and undercuts it at every turn with a surprisingly raw mean-spiritedness. Plummer’s character is a cruel, crude alcoholic who abuses people indiscriminately. Angarano’s poor-boy protagonist picks fights and steals a car for a joy ride because it’s the same model as the possessed vehicle in Stephen King’s “Christine.” Part of their bonding experience involves blatantly sabotaging their rival’s film. Schroeder plays none of this for laughs, even in a dark “Bad Santa” way; his characters aren’t rule-bending scamps, they’re petty, vindictive  and selfish.

But they’re also talented creators learning more about their art and themselves, which helps rescue “Man in the Chair” from the complete grotesquerie it sometimes courts. Schroeder walks a difficult line, and stumbles on both sides of it, veering toward bathos one moment, and making his characters utterly unlikable the next. And he further roughs up his film with jumpy music-video editing and twitchy experimental-film games that blur, overlay, desaturate  and vibrate his images to little good purpose, aside from an extra sense of dislocation.

But he’s saved by gripping performances from Plummer and from M. Emmet Walsh as his deteriorating screenwriter buddy. In large part, “Man in the Chair” is about how the past informs the present, and all the things older people have to offer the generations that follow them. By salvaging a troubled script with deep, committed, touching portrayals, Plummer and Walsh help prove Schroeder’s points about how Hollywood isn’t just the province of the rich, young  and pretty.

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