Short Round: Somebody Up There Likes Me (2013) **/*****

Somebody Up There Likes Me, a new arthouse comedy from writer/director Bob Byington, is probably most notable because it features supporting roles for Parks and Recreations’ Nick Offerman and his lovely wife, Megan Mullally. But it should be noted that it features talented young actors in its feature roles too. The Color Wheel’s Keith Poulson stars as Max, a guy who floats his way through life without becoming engaged in anything that happens to him. He gets married to and has a kid with his first wife, Lyla (Teeth’s Jess Weixler), cheats on her with his nanny and second wife, Clarissa (Stephanie Hunt), inherits a fortune, loses a fortune, becomes friends with Offerman’s character, finds out Offerman’s character is sleeping with his wife, and then starts a business with Offerman’s character. The whole to-do takes place over the course of a few decades, and through it all Max is able to keep his cool, ironic detachment.

While that detachment is definitely a deliberate choice and is likely artistically accentuated in order to make some sort of commentary about today’s earnestness-fearing hipster culture, that still means we’re watching a movie about a protagonist who doesn’t much care about anything that happens to him, and ultimately that becomes a huge problem. Byington’s script is able to provide a handful of chuckles due to dry humor and absurdist dialogue, but when you’re following the travails of a character who can experience a lifetime’s worth of ups and downs without responding to any of it, why are we supposed to keep watching? What are the stakes? 

Even worse than that though, the disengagement doesn’t stop at the lead character. As the film develops, the too-cool-for-school attitude seems to creep into Byington’s filmmaking as well—to the point where he doesn’t bother to visibly age the main characters, or even alter Poulson’s hairstyle, as things develop down through the decades. The message seems to be that putting in the effort to bring a story to life visually is typical and ordinary, and Somebody Up There Likes Me is too much of a unique snowflake to engage in such clichéd effort-making. But the effect is that you end up resenting the film for wasting your time while it high-mindedly experiments, and ultimately you forget about the handful of times it was able to make you laugh. Ron Swanson is much too talented to spend his time away from Parks and Rec making stuff like this.