Movie Review: Going out in deluded, high song in ‘The Living Wake’

Sol Tryon’s “The Living Wake” seems but a protracted act of stultifying self-indulgence — but then maybe that’s the point. It stars stand-up comic Mike O’Connell, who looks like a shorter, stockier Conan O’Brien, as an incessantly eccentric would-be literary lion who, convinced by his doctor he is soon to die from a grave but unidentified disease, gathers his neighbors to put on a show that is to end with him dropping dead. (O’Connell and co-producer Peter Kline co-wrote the script.)

O’Connell’s K. Roth Binew speaks with unstinting grandiloquence and is transported everywhere in a rickshaw attached to a bicycle ridden by his adoring manservant Mills Joquin (Jesse Eisenberg). Binew remains enraged at having been abandoned in childhood by his father, spouts off on this and that and drinks a lot. None of this seems amusing or enlightening or even all that original, but Binew and his hijinks, it should be reported, have found admirers among serious critics and film festival audiences.

Whatever traction “The Living Wake” accrues occurs in Kinew’s farewell show in which he declaims, sings and encounters the ghost of his father. In a flash of self-awareness he grasps that he will never have a seat at a table of literary greats and is but a stupid drunk. The film becomes a cautionary tale on self-importance fed by a need for recognition so desperate that it smacks of fantasy and madness. The ghost of Binew’s father applauds his son for his fearlessness. The number of clearly talented individuals who committed themselves to the folly of “The Living Wake” were fearless too.

-----

“The Living Wake.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes. Playing at the Sunset 5, West Hollywood.