Paper Man (2009)

Fantastic!

Absolutely Fantastic

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

This is a movie with a stellar cast, who have some of their best performances of their careers (espacially Jeff Daniels and Emma Stone). Though is it pretty funny at times, it's definitely no comedy. It's mainly a drama, with a stong indie feel to it, where the plot isn't that important. It really touched me and I had to let the movie sink in for a while. The soundtrack is absolutely wonderful and complements the film very well. I absolutely fail to see why this move has such a low rating, I guess it's because people expectet a comedy or a romcom, which it really isn't. I just think it best to watch this movie without expectations and emerse yourself in it.

'Paper Man' is a bizarre and tediously dull movie that never even seems sure of what it's trying to achieve. Most of the film is nothing more than a generic friendship story. A middle-aged man going through something of a midlife crisis befriends a younger girl, who helps him get back on track. But the man also has an imaginary friend, 'Captain Excellent', who I guess was supposed to bring the humour to the film... with little success.One of the main problems with 'Paper Man' is that it's so slow that it almost feels like its going backwards. It really is boring, even for someone with the patience of a saint. You would have thought a character like 'Captain Excellent' would have made the movie more interesting, but no. He adds very little to a film that already doesn't have much going for it. Jeff Daniels and Emma Stone are probably the only positives to speak of. Both deliver good performances and share the odd decent scene. Ryan Reynolds on the other hand, the less said the better.

Richard (Jeff Daniels) is a published but unsuccessful writer, married to successful doctor Claire (Lisa Kudrow). The marriage is in low-key trouble because Richard is floundering, both in his writing and in life in general, as is made clear by the fact that he is accompanied by his childhood imaginary friend, super-hero Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds). As an unspoken measure of last resort, Richard goes to a holiday cabin to try to find his muse: instead, he finds Abby (Emma Stone), a youngster with issues of her own. A relationship grows between Richard and Abby, but it may well cause more problems that it solves.Despite its relatively high profile cast, and despite the fact that I am an enthusiastic cinema-goer and film follower, I had never heard of this film under either its original title of Paper Man or the title under which I found it in the Pound Shop, Unlikely Hero. Add the fact that it appears to have been re-marketed as a quasi-super-hero movie, and I was unprepared for what followed.The story is gentle and leisurely, but quite dark at times. It is not even slightly a comedy despite the DVD case giving that impression. Daniels gives Richard an air of affability, a mechanism he uses to compensate for his inability to deal with life: this makes it a little too easy to overlook how good his performance is.But this is Emma Stone's film: she is wonderful.

Some reviews seem to have pegged this as a mere indie romp, the quirky, gushy type that hasn't felt novel since the mid-00s. That tag doesn't quite do Paper Man justice. Sure, the surface style is a bit derivative. We've seen older men forging an inappropriate relationship with a high school girl before (Juno, American Beauty), and we've seen plenty of cutesy indie films about 20-something would-be-artistes struggling to grow up and get a real job (Flakes, for one). But this movie is quite a bit more deranged than all that. These characters aren't merely eccentric, their idiosyncrasies hover well past the line into downright pathology.First we have our protagonist. Not a disillusioned 20-something hipster, he's a man well into middle age who has no real job, no social skills and still clings to a (sometimes abusive) imaginary friend. Somehow this man with no prospects and no skills is married to a successful surgeon who isolates her maladjusted, delusional, slacker husband up in a rural cabin believing that -- somehow -- leaving him to his own devices and letting him run amok in solitude will help to repair his crippling mental state. Finally we come to Abby, a teenage girl so desperate for companionship that she tolerates a neglectful slob of a boyfriend, a deranged, obsessive stalker who follows her wherever she goes, and a middle-aged married man who lures her to his empty house under the guise of a babysitting job. Her response to being set-up by this pervert? She makes him soup. If her parents exist, they don't much concern themselves with her, and she has no other acquaintances.This is an intriguing character study with some decent heart to be found. It's fascinating to explore these broken individuals and the movie's definitely worth a watch. Unfortunately, the courage with which these characters were created is not matched by the movie's highly formulaic ending, which largely glosses over their more serious instabilities. However, with so many otherwise solid indie projects these days ending abruptly with far too little closure (Not Fade Away, Palo Alto), I'm willing to accept a little undue schmaltz from Paper Man. The cast also garners mentioning. With Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Lisa Kudrow and Jeff Daniels, they couldn't have put together a better ensemble for this film. The performances are entertaining enough just on their own merits.