[Thisstorycontainsminorspoilers[Thisstorycontainslightspoilersforoutcome.]
Jonah Hill has lived many lives since audiences were first introduced to him in comedies such as I knocked and The forty-year-old virgin. Just look at his cameo last week Saturday Night Livein which he appears during the opening monologue welcoming Jack Black to the Five Timer’s Club alongside Tina Fey, Candice Bergen, and others.
Hill’s five hosting gigs were played SNL It is a study in the many deviations of his career. When he first hosted in 2008, he was fresh off starring in the raunchy teen comedy super bad, Establishing himself as a smart comedic guy. At his third hosting gig in 2014, he was joined on stage during his monologue by Leonardo DiCaprio, his co-star in the incendiary satire. The Wolf of Wall Streetreet, a Martin Scorsese film that earned Hill his second Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor Moneyball Only three years ago. By 2018, when Hill was welcomed into the Five-Timers club by Fey and Bergen, he had transformed again, this time into a film director. Mid-nineties.
Last week’s appearance was timely, of course, because Hill has a new movie, outcome. He directs, co-writes, and stars in the film, which earned him attention for his physical transformation months before his arrival. It’s also a difficult film to watch without drawing parallels to both Hill’s strange and unexpected arc, as well as the real-life controversies that could have destroyed his career.
outcome It focuses on a Hollywood star terrified of cancellation. Keanu Reeves plays Reeve Hawke, a world-famous movie star with two Oscars to his name. But Reeve also has been in five years of recovery from a devastating heroin addiction that the loving public is thankfully unaware of. He, his loyal high school friends (Cameron Diaz and Matt Bomer), and his quirky crisis lawyer Ira (Hale, bald with a bushy gray beard), have worked hard to keep his public image clean. Because of this, the possibility of a mysterious videotape containing terrible material leads Reef to go on an apology tour to set the record straight and find out who might have the tape and why they want to reveal it to the world.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about him outcome It’s that it has so many great asides amid really obnoxious comedic choices and very clear commentary on the separation between art and artist. (The latter is helpfully demonstrated by a smug poster.) Hill co-wrote the film with Ezra Woods, and perhaps thinks he’s making a salient commentary by having a personal observation that being anti-Semitic no longer holds you back from success, and then cuts to a big picture of Kanye West. (Recent events in the UK might suggest otherwise.)
But the sides outcome This resonance has almost nothing to do with the irrational specter of cancel culture. Instead, we watch Reeves interact in this 83-minute short with a variety of performers whether he shares history with them or not, from Diaz and Bomer to Susan Lucci as Reeve’s mother and even, yes, Scorsese as the star’s first manager.
But to consider the other half of outcomeyou can’t help but think about Hill’s career. Since 2016, Hill has only appeared in five live-action films, including this one. (He has other comedies, to cutscheduled to open this summer.) But when he first became famous, he proved to be a highly entertaining performer in everything from the outrageously funny Jump Street movies to Moneyball to Cyrus.
He didn’t have the career that Reef Hawk had. (The fictional character seems like a natural outgrowth of Reeves himself, or perhaps someone like Hill.) Moneyball (Shared by co-star Brad Pitt when you factor in Oscar wins.) But Hill was able to jump from comedy to drama, and also flexed his muscles behind the camera with… Mid-nineties.
In 2022, he attracted attention by announcing that he would no longer give interviews due to anxiety. In the same year, he released his documentary on Netflix StutzAbout his relationship with his treating physician. It seemed like a surprisingly honest inside look. But then, this was put in a new light after a former friend called Hill a “misogynistic narcissist,” accused him of controlling behavior, and shared some of her text messages — all of which damaged Hill’s public character.
outcomewith its setting, is almost designed to make you compare Hill to Reef with his unhealthy focus on what strangers think of him coupled with an unwillingness to behave properly.
“Not many people can relate to a movie star, but the way I see it is we’ve all turned ourselves into burned-out, middle-aged movie stars by setting our lives up to being judged by social media every second of every day,” Hill told Scorsese in an interview published this week. “You go through the same feelings as being Tom Cruise, as well as being a mother in Salt Lake City who puts her kids on the Internet for public judgment.”
in outcomethe strip in question within the film ends up being, if not innocuous, then relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. It’s not Much Ado About Nothing, but Hill seems to be trying out an argument that focusing too much on how other people perceive you is almost as bad, if not as bad, as making someone want to cancel a famous person.
outcome It has an impressive cast, and because much of the film is structured as conversations between Reeves and one co-star after another, it’s not entirely without merit. But the basic idea that the desperate pressure to punish people for their bad deeds is almost as bad as the bad deeds themselves is ridiculous; To be fair, that would be nonsense no matter who argues it.
At one point, Ira and Reeve have what amounts to a heart-to-heart conversation, with a huge picture of Kevin Spacey looming over them in the background. Aside from the spontaneous visual gag, it’s worth noting that while few people really do He owns “Canceled” Since the arrival of the #MeToo movement, Spacey has become the closest thing to it.
Jonah Hill has been called out for his alleged misconduct, yes, but he still manages to deliver a great-looking, low-stakes comedy-drama with a huge cast and backed by one of the biggest tech companies in the world. It’s hard to imagine who the idiot guy is acceptablethe 2006 college comedy in which he dressed as a hot dog and had people ask him “about my food” reached this point of outrageous self-defense. But he protests a little too much.
