The Bottom Line -- Barry Ronge

Successful stand-up comedians like Barry Hilton can often come unstuck when they tackle a longer comedy role. Stand-up has no shading, no subtlety. It hi-jacks the audience with one-liners and in a feature movie that can become exhausting. With Russell Savadier’s sharp script and Neil Sundstrom’s deftly paced direction, Barry Hilton settles down into a gentler and much more expressive style, and that does wonder for the movie.  

Main Review

Comedian Barry Hilton is a favourite with South African audiences and his first foray into feature movies could have gone terribly wrong. So many stand-up comics see a feature movie just as a bigger stage on which they can do more, bigger and dirtier gags. Leon Schuster’s comedies are a prime example of this. Fortunately Hilton has a good writing team, lead by Russell Savadier, and director, Neil Sundstrom, who has a gentle but effective touch with comedy. The story is about a man in the throes of a mid-life crisis. Barry Hilton plays Lenny whose fiftieth birthday turns into an emotional war-zone. He is sacked by the primary school at which he coaches the junior soccer team. He loses his job as a newspaper sports writer to a BEE initiative. His wife ditches him for a pampered toy-boy and to round off a dreadful day, Lenny is hijacked and dumped into the boot of a car that is left in the middle of nowhere.

Lenny is rescued by the people of the local African tribe who take him back to their village to help him to get over his ordeal. The nice thing about Lenny is that he is a genuinely nice guy. He does not wallow in his own misery for long and pretty soon he becomes aware that the tribe’s chief is having a spot of bother with his two sons. One son is loyal to the family and to his cultural tradition. He wants to protect the ancestral land, to preserve the tribal customs and to honour the amadlozi, the ancestors.  The other son is yuppie sell out who lives in the city, squanders his money on luxury cars and apartments and hangs out with the affluent whites. He has sold his soul to a greedy corporate tycoon who wants to buy up the tribe’s ancestral land and has put his own advancement before that of his family and his tribe. In the meantime Lenny has been coaching the tribe’s amateur soccer team and he reckons they are pretty good, and after a couple of plot twists and turns it all comes down to a crucial soccer match, in which the brothers play against each other, with the ownership of the tribal land as the prize.

The film does not have, as you will see, any ingenious plot ideas or novel concepts. But it does have heart and fine sense of humour. It reminded me of that wave of British comedies in the early Nineties, where working class heroes rallied their local communities to do something to uplift their village or factory or team. It started with “Brassed Off” (1996), and was followed by “The Full Monty” (1997), “Billy Elliot” (2000) and “Kinky Boots” (2005).  They all kept the context small and local, but made the emotions and the laughter big and bold so that and they plugged away at the “triumph of the little man” theme. It’s a well-worn comedy template, but director Cedric Sundstrom and writer Russell Savadier make excellent use of local issues and smartly imagined situations to keep it racing along a good comedy pace. There’s also just enough human warmth and laughter to get the audience to suspend disbelief and settle in for a fun ride.

The big surprise is the comic energy of Barry Hilton, who doesn’t rely on his familiar comedy routines. He is convincing as a sweet-natured bloke, whose life has fallen apart, but instead of getting manic and outrageous, he picks up the pieces and is honest enough to stay true to himself. It’s very broad comedy and it’s often sentimental but it is competently staged and when compared to Schuster’s overwrought, slapdash, relentlessly lavatorial style, you’ll find that “Finding Lenny” has the charm of a real comedy and I look forward to Hilton’s next movie. 

A SATISFYING 7!

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