Mr. Wonderful

A struggling middle-aged man finds himself swept back up into the lives of his father and his son, as circumstances beyond his control force them back together in some difficult situations.

Professor Brian Fenton (Madsen) is stuck in a rut. He’s been teaching at some mid-rate further education college in California for around twenty years now, still without tenure, and without having published any work for over ten years. He’s upped his alcohol intake to every day, and has taken to sometime day-drinking to stave off the existential dread. His lectures are the most boring, turgid crap, where he can barely get the words out due to his over-gruff, deep, raspy voice, and the students are in the process of revolting. Ironically, Brian is trying to teach about the American Revolution, and the misconceptions and false narratives surrounding it, but this all falls on deaf ears as his bad attitude and bad grades cause a cabal of his 4th years to conspire against him.

On top of all this, Brian’s son, Danny (Laenen), has turned up from further down the coast, escaping his cheating girlfriend as well as a few drug dealers that he’s pinched some money from. Danny’s decided to camp out with his father and his second wife, Corinne (Hodge), for a while so that he can get his head together and maybe get a home cooked meal. Getting it together isn’t really on the cards for Danny as he is a developmentally arrested thirty-something man-child, and besides, his trailer-trash girlfriend, Dawn (Underwood), has followed him to his dad’s house to try and get him and her money back.

As pressure piles upon pressure, Brian then has to deal with the ailing health of his father (Miano), who, all the way down in Texas, is dealing with dementia, and is becoming a threat to himself and his second wife, Claire (Barnes). Trying to take it all in his stride, and with a calm, Californian attitude, Brian is actually quite close to the edge. Corinne is an enormous support, but even she draws the line at Danny’s idiocy, and the arrival of Dawn throws everything into total disarray. Sooner or later, Brian is likely to break, and he can’t see clear to a path out of his huge pile-on of family trauma.

Played by the late, great Michael Madsen, in his last starring role, Brian presents as a sour but amiable character, who’d just like everything to go back to normal, everything to work out, and everyone else to f*** off. Madsen imbues Brian with a feeling of history, if not entirely a chequered one like his more famous roles, and grants him a pathos that might not have been there otherwise. He ambles about from scene to scene, swilling wine, laughing at others, making some barbed statements, and bouncing off the other characters, with and without sunglasses, sometimes taking them off and putting them on as he goes. Each scene is filled with presence, and when the story lags, or the other characters don’t perform adequately enough on screen, Madsen is always there to pick up the slack and bring the film back into focus, giving it all he’s got, even as he knows he doesn’t have long left.

That’s not to say that the other acting is not good, because it is, in fact it’s consistently strong right across the board as everyone delivers their characters down to a T. It’s just that the characters themselves are fairly poorly drawn, with very little backstory and very bland introductions. They respond to situations in a one-note fashion and never actually grow from the start of the film to the end, leaving the actors to spout quite childish dialogue while trying to save some drama from the situation, with varying results. The script, from writer Daniel Blake Smith, is taken from his own book, and one has to wonder if the quality of writing in that tome is similar to this, or whether the transition to screenplay has left some of the actual content out.

Director, Mark David, is similarly average in his delivery, keeping a lot of his scenes still, or with simple tracking, and offering zero sense of visual style or flair. There’s a functionality about the way the narrative and the scenes are pieced together, and nothing ever really stretches beyond that to give something more to the audience. This also plays into the performances, where a certain am-dram quality is sprinkled over the proceedings due to the farcical nature of what is happening on screen. Thankfully, there’s a family feel to the ensemble nature of the piece, and everyone looks to be enjoying themselves on-screen, offering a relaxed atmosphere and a growing sense of nostalgia as the story nears its end.

Conclusion would be too strong a word for how things are wrapped up in Mr. Wonderful, as more things are resolved by the freeing up of cash than they are by actual character development. However, there’s a nice bookending to the narrative that gives Brian his arcing trajectory, and by the end of it we’re all just happy to have gone on the journey with Michael Madsen, gaining another hour-and three-quarters with a screen legend who was never allowed to make his mark as a leading man anywhere near as much as he should have.