BERNARD AND HUEY

Film Review by FIORE

Woody Allen launched his career by writing scripts dealing with the foibles of neurotic people.  Allen’s success spawned a plethora of imitators.  Count Writer Jules Feiffer and Director Dan Mirvish among them.  They now offer BERNARD AND HUEY on VOD and home video.  It’s basically a confrontation between macho males and girlie men.  It offers a few laughs along the way and a fine performance by David Koechner, but otherwise plays like a visual version of Linda Ronstadt’s “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me.”

BERNARD AND HUEY begins in the 1980’s, with two friends Huey (Koechner) who is a “cocksman”, bedding numerous women with his dashing good looks and cavaliere attitude.  Think Charlie Sheen’s character on TWO AND A HALF MEN; and Bernard, played by Jim Rash, who is a “dweeb”, a man with no luck with women, who is kind and sensitive.  Huey attempts to find a girl for his buddy Bernard from his black book, but most of the encounters end poorly.

The film then bounces to the present time.  Roles have reverse.  Due to the changes in culture, Bernard the whimp is now scoring women, even though he bores them to tears with his constant analysis and emotional diatribes.  Huey is a balding, paunched middle aged man who cannot effectively communicate with today’s women.  When Huey suddenly appears at Bernard’s doorstep, a series of events unfold which demonstrate the two men cannot escape from their personalities and soon revert to their old school day ways.

Starring with Koechner and Rash are Jake O’Connor and Jay Renshaw as their younger selves, respectively; Zelda, Huey’s feminista daughter, played by Mae Whitman; Roz, Bernard’s girlfriend and shrink played by Sasha Alexander; Mona, Bernard’s work partner, played by Nancy Travis and Huey’s ex, Aggie, played by Bellamy Young.

Dan Capuzzi edits the film with reckless abandon.  Time shifts between present day and three decades ago are done randomly.  It takes several shifts before the hard transitions become comfortable.  Director of Photography Todd Somodevilla shoots BERNARD AND HUEY in New York style, a documentary look for a narrative tale.

The publicity for BERNARD AND HUEY claims it is a film “about two men behaving badly, and the smart women who rein them in.”  This is strictly a PR stunt to attract a female audience and be politically correct.  The film is really about the tiger not being capable of changing its stripes.  It doesn’t take long for Huey to, once again, begin bedding every female while Bernard is left with his own neurotic loneliness.  It’s also painfully obvious the filmmakers identify with Bernard.  They are the whimp man constantly overshadowed by the alpha man, and their attempts to turn sympathy toward Bernard are palpable and connived.  

BERNARD AND HUEY is a film for former high school quarterbacks who long for what Bruce Springsteen sang in “Glory Days”, and fans of Jerry Steinfeld,  celebrate whose entire comedy routines are based on what the Arnold refers to as “the girlie man”.