Herzog only plays a supporting role but he's the funniest thing in The Grand. The film reunites him with writer-director Zak Penn. The two had collaborated on another mockumentary, Incident at Loch Ness (which started brilliantly and quickly descended into stupidity). In that film, Herzog played himself in a fake documentary about a film shoot gone horribly wrong. In The Grand, Herzog plays The German, but he's essentially playing himself. But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.
The Grand doesn't revolve Herzog or The German. It's a mockumentary "in the tradition of improvisational comedies like Best in Show and This is Spinal Tap ." So promises the press release. But instead of a dog show or a rock band, The Grand focuses on a group of poker players vying for a $10 million pot. The key contenders are One Eyed Jack Faro (Woody Harrelson), a down on his luck grandson of a casino owner; sibling rivals Lainie (Cheryl Hines) and Larry (David Cross) Schwartzman; old-timer L.B.J. Deuce Fairbanks (Dennis Farina); poker neophyte Andy Andrews (Richard Kind); and the droning and discontented Harold Melvin (Chris Parnell), who still lives with his mom. The film conducts interviews with all the participants and covers game play with a couple of badly bantering hosts guiding us through the tournament. There are also a number of scenes that stray from the mock documentary format and are simply scenes that Penn wanted to include of characters interacting but which do not look as if they were shot for a documentary.
Dennis Farina and Hank Azaria are poker players in The Grand (Anchor Bay)
Not sticking to the format that he sets up for himself is just one of the reasons why Penn's comedy falls short. The best films are the ones that pay attention to details no matter how small. But I could have tolerated the breaking with the format, if the film worked better as a comedy. The main problem is that Penn emphasizes the mock rather than the documentary in his mockumentary. That means that all the characters are set up like sitting ducks to be ridiculed and made the butt of jokes. The key to Christopher Guest's faux docs (especially This is Spinal Tap ) is that they create good characters - and ones that Guest actually seems to like - and then they let the comedy flow from those personalities. Guest's films are not about a bunch of actors trying to be funny; they are about supposedly real people who, for the most part, are trying to be serious.
Penn doesn't seem to hold any affection for his characters and instead designs them in such a way that they only exist to be made fun of. Jack reveals his casino designs - one in which the building is on fire constantly, and the other looking like the nuclear reactors from The Simpsons and powered by nuclear energy. The designs don't really seem like something Jack would come up with nor do they reveal something about Jack. But the scene does what Penn designs it to do - to get a laugh out of making Jack look stupid. Similarly, Andrews' wife is made to have an obsession with ribbons but when she's interviewed in her work area surrounded by thousands of spools, she looks pathetic and reveals that she contemplates torching the whole place. And Jason Alexander has a cameo as a gambler of "unknown" Middle Eastern origin. He wears offensive brown-face make-up and overacts horribly. All these scenes play like stand alone sketch gags and they don't make the film better as a whole.
Richard Kind and Woody Harrelson gamble in The Grand (Anchor Bay)
Under trivia, IMDb lists the fact that the "script was barely 29 pages long." Well it shows. So Penn relies on his actors to improvise... a lot. What we end up with are occasionally inspired moments. The material that works the best is the stuff in which the performers work toward creating a strong character and family relationships. So Chris Parnell's belligerent son is so consistently rude to his mother that it becomes a funny running gag. Similarly, the Schwartzman family provides funny material as you see the family dynamics at work. Gabe Kaplan shows up as the pushy Schwartzman dad who encourages his kids to compete. He says, "If you tell one you don't love him as much, he'll try harder." The dysfunctions of this family provide at least one of the subplots with some kind of story and character arc that engages you.
As with his Incident at Loch Ness , Penn doesn't seem able to differentiate between his strengths and his weaknesses. Herzog and Farina, as the old time gamblers are great fun and really have a handle on their characters, but they are eliminated early on, much to the detriment of the film. The thing that makes Herzog so good is that he's so damn serious. While the handful of main stars obviously have their tongue in cheek, Herzog acts as if this is all dead serious - and that's what makes his scenes so funny. He blurs the line between fact and fiction, and makes us think that we really are watching a documentary. And that's precisely what you want a mockumentary to be like. If you are constantly aware that it's fake than it becomes a very self-serving and self-indulgent work. But with Herzog, we feel like he's drawing on real things. In the end credits he discusses strangling a goose - or something like that, I missed part of it because I was laughing too hard - and it might be an improv, it might be a story from his real life, it might be a joke he's telling. What makes it hilarious is that we can't tell which. If Herzog decides to stop directing, he may have a career ahead of him mocking himself.
The Grand (rated R for language and some drug content) is chock full of talented performers but Penn isn't a good enough ringleader to guide them to their best work or to create a framework to best display their talents. The stakes may be $10 million for the characters but the film feels more like nickel slots.
Companion viewing: This is Spinal Tap, Peter Jackson's Forgotten Silver, Casino Royale, Best in Show, The Cincinnati Kid; King of Kong (a real documentary that just feels like a fake one)
