Listen Up Philip (2014)
Directed by Alex Ross Perry
Anger rages in Philip as he awaits the publication of his second novel. He feels pushed out of his adopted home city by the constant crowds and noise, a deteriorating relationship with his photographer girlfriend Ashley, and his own indifference to promoting the novel. When Philip's idol Ike Zimmerman offers his isolated summer home as a refuge, he finally gets the peace and quiet to focus on his favorite subject: himself.
4 connections found
View:
4 films that influenced Listen Up Philip
What critics say influenced Listen Up Philip
A montage of perfectly spot-on mock first-edition covers à la The Royal Tenenbaums introduces the viewer to Ike’s vast oeuvre, including such classics as Madness & Woman and The Audit, and his very telling failed attempt at expanding his range, A Woman’s Perspective.
(This movie beats The Royal Tenenbaums for best fake book covers.)
You’ll get a tang of The Squid and the Whale, and echoes of The Royal Tenenbaums: the latter because the film essentially “is” a novel, narrated by Bogosian’s off-screen omniscient storyteller (earnestly intoning what sounds like a very stodgy, old-fashioned slab of psychological realism), and because it too contains an array of apocryphal book jackets, brilliantly crafted by Teddy Blanks, who has also designed credits in perfect Seventies paperback cover typeface.
These early passages of “Listen Up Philip” rush at the viewer in short, staccato scenes accompanied by the running voiceover of an omniscient narrator (Eric Bogosian, a la Alec Baldwin in “The Royal Tenenbaums”), which creates the sense that Philip is forever transfiguring his life into fiction, even as it is happening to him in the moment.
Loaded with voiceover and literary satire reminiscent of “The Royal Tenenbaums,” “Listen Up Philip” overdoes it with Eric Bogosian’s narration.
The disgruntled novelist’s wife in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer—of which Perry’s film is a loose adaptation in all but name—could have been referring to Friedman or Ike Zimmerman, his much older, equally miserable mentor, when she says, of her husband, that “not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of.”
Yes, it’s a riff on Roth’s novel “The Ghost Writer,” a story about a young writer, Philip Lewis Friedman, who accepts an invitation to the rural home of an established (though now blocked) elder writer.
Playfully mixing around component parts from Roth’s The Ghost Writer, Perry borrows the setup and then veers off into another direction altogether.
He’s a little bit Roth himself, in a cruel way, and a great deal of Roth’s fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, and of E.I. Lonoff, the literary mentor to young Zuckerman in Roth’s The Ghost Writer.
Early on, Zimmerman invites Philip to stay at his country retreat, a situation recalling that of The Ghost Writer, in which young Zuckerman is a weekend guest at the rural house of an older writer, in some ways modeled on Roth’s own hero Bernard Malamud.
Hewing close to a modern New York classic a la “Frances Ha,” the acerbic, witty, erudite echoes of Noah Baumbach and his belligerent characters are discernible.
But Philip, who's been antagonizing everybody lately, decides against doing any press, instead hitching his post to an idol, Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce, "Brazil," "Hysteria"), who not only admires his new book but has offered his country home as a writing retreat in "Listen Up Philip."