As a person going through a divorce at roughly the same point in my life as the main character of this movie, the idea of going to see an emotionally inept man choose to willingly undergo standup comedy rather than therapy or whatever seemed a little raw. My partner and I had just started talking more seriously about me moving out and I was a few days away from receiving keys to the Upsidedown while also attempting in some way to playact the unbraiding of thirteen years of my life through the weighty decisions of What Books to Pack and Building Ikea Furniture For Small People at Midnight Alone. I think I ended up double-featuring this movie with the We Bury Our Dead because it was January and Why Not, but also I just was generally not sure which movie I would like less, a jump scare horror film or a jump scare mirror to my life.
On the whole, Is This Thing On? is a limp joke delivery mechanism that does what other Sad Dad comedies (like Ted Lasso (the quintessential Sad Dad) and more recently and cuttingly Friendship, but also for reasons that are plot-related farther down the line, The Lovers [2015]) do but worse. At its core what’s lacking from the film is a reason for separation. Will Arnett and Laura Dern’s opening scene has them mutually deciding to split for unspecified reasons, chalk it up to midlife malaise. Because there’s no sense of sexual infidelity, there’s really no animus between the two parties and nothing for them to work through. It amounts to a rumspringa in their relationship in which they have time to explore alternative paths not taken and recognize the good in their partners and their own repeated misunderstandings in that relationship. The high school-aged children act as a Greek chorus, omniscient in their understanding and patience with their cagey parents. Arnett goes through the motions of Divorced Dad tropes from apartment to folding children’s socks for the first time to casing his own house like he’s about fifteen seconds from Ms Doubtfiring the place.
Laura Dern gets to go on an awkward date with a cameo. There’s a twist and Bradley Cooper gives some sage advice, which brings me to maybe the most important thing I can communicate about this movie, which is that Bradley Cooper has really got out of control and it’s up to all of us to rein him in.
So, this Oscar nominated star (and granted, his last nom was in 2023 with Maestro, but before that was when he partnered with Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born from 2018) has basically been trapped as either an animated Racoon sidekick or a beta male caricature for the last five years, and the one exception to that is Guillermo del Toro’s awful Nightmare Alley. In ITTO he plays a copypasta of his Dungeons and Dragon’s character, who honestly adds almost nothing to the plot and sort of hinders a lot of development. It makes me so sad and confused to watch this clearly gifted actor spend the best years of his acting career slurping Marvel’s bathwater and this should serve as a wake up call to all of us about the dangers of golden handcuffs.
