Jonah Hill has directed and co-written an impressive little movie with “Outcome.” It could be called a Hollywood satire, but what’s striking about it — and audacious and unexpected — is that it’s dramatic and heartfelt. Here and there, it even comes close to being sentimental.
“Outcome” shifts tone from scene to scene and is all over the place, and yet it works. But how did Hill know it wouldn’t turn into a big mess?
Perhaps what allows Hill to succeed is that he knows the truth of what he’s presenting and that these wild shifts are in harmony with how he sees the world he’s depicting. Sometimes the organizing principle behind a work of art needs to be nothing more than the mind of the artist doing the creating. Hill had an idea in his head, and that idea is transmitted purely onto the screen.
The story centers on Keanu Reeves as Reef, who has been a major Tom Cruise-level movie star for three decades. He’s won two Oscars and is known as one of the nicest guys in the business. Now he’s coming back after a five-year hiatus.
What the public doesn’t know is that he has spent a lot of that time recovering from a long-term heroin addiction. Reef is already worried that the heroin story will come out. He has yet more cause for concern when his “crisis lawyer,” played by Hill, calls to say that someone has some unspecified dirt on him and is about to post a video on social media.
The whole opening to the film is nonstop funny. Matt Bomer and Cameron Diaz trade funny bits as Reef’s lifelong friends/assistants, and Hill is close to hilarious as the lawyer who saves time by taking meetings on his toilet.
Then comes the shift. As a preemptive measure, Reef decides to apologize to all the people he has ever wronged. His first stop is to see the man who discovered him only to be dumped by Reef when he became successful. Martin Scorsese plays this manager, and it’s a lovely, gentle performance, in which he’s nothing like the usual manic Scorsese. (This man may have missed his calling. He’s as good an actor as his late mother, the great Catherine Scorsese.)
After a while, Hill’s approach to telling the story becomes clear. Basically, any scene that has to do with the business and public sides of movies, he presents as ridiculous. But everything to do with Reef’s emotional life and the people in his circle is played seriously.
This strategy allows Hill to be as wildly absurd and funny as he wants to be, while preserving a quality of suspense in the blackmail story. It allows Welker White, in the midst of a bizarre comedy, to have a quiet, searing monologue as the woman that Reef loved and betrayed many years ago. And it allows us, through Reeves’ sensitive, worried performance, to care about what’s going to happen to a selfish movie star.
Speaking of Reeves, “Outcome” is a nice reminder of the kind-spirited quality that Reeves can bring to the screen when he’s not murdering hundreds of people in the course of a “John Wick” movie. It’s not too late to go back to being a sweet guy.
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