Jersey Girl
Next month the second Chicago International Documentary Festival will screen Mark Brian Smith’s fascinating Overnight, which chronicles the precipitous rise and fall of indie filmmaker Troy Duffy. A blue-collar kid from Boston and a giant in his own mind, Duffy hit the jackpot in March 1997 when Harvey Weinstein, the fabled cochairman of Miramax Films, bought Duffy’s script for a post-Tarantino shoot-’em-up called The Boondock Saints and proclaimed him “a unique, exciting new voice in American movies.” A year later Miramax pulled out of the deal, and though the project was eventually picked up by the smaller Franchise Pictures, it opened on a meager five screens and vanished a week later.
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Unlike Troy Duffy, who seems to interpret his sudden wealth and fame as proof that he’s been cheated all his life, Smith has always assessed his talent more modestly (and more accurately), and he’s been remarkably loyal to the man who pulled him out of the Quik Stop and onto the national stage. “Harvey’s a twisted father figure to Kevin,” notes producer John Shestack in Peter Biskind’s new book, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film. Two months ago, when the book came out depicting Weinstein as a manipulative bastard consumed by ego and greed, Smith released a letter to the press defending his mentor as “the last, great movie mogul” and concluding, “In the dysfunctional family that is the movie biz, I couldn’t ask for a better father. And while I can’t put words in the man’s mouth, I suspect Harvey would sum up everything I’ve written above thusly…’Jersey Girl. In theaters everywhere, March 19.’”
I don’t know of many people who consider the movie business a family, functional or otherwise, but Smith seems to have fatherhood on the brain these days: his own father died shortly after the completion of Jersey Girl, and his experiences as a new dad heavily inform the movie. Ben Affleck, who’s very funny here indeed, stars as Ollie Trinke, a hotshot New York music publicist blissfully in love with his movie-perfect wife (Jennifer Lopez). Pregnant with their first child, she breaks down crying before the MTV Music Awards because she looks so bovine and knows the other women there will be slim and slinky. Affleck, the gallant romantic lead, embraces and comforts her, cooing, “They’re just skinny ’cause they’re all coked-out whores.” Shortly thereafter she dies in childbirth, in a scene that powerfully shifts from familiar delivery-room comedy to frightening confusion, and after losing his flashy job Ollie moves back to Highlands, New Jersey, to raise his infant daughter, joining his crabby widowed father (George Carlin) as a street cleaner for the borough.
Though Smith is clearly not averse to working the phones when it suits his interests, he establishes Ollie’s publicity career as a negative pole that pulls him away from a truer life with his old man, his father’s two thick-necked buddies (Mike Starr and Stephen Root), and Gertie, who works them all like Shirley Temple. As a publicist Ollie takes enormous pride in his ability to weave a “web of bullshit,” and Smith illustrates this with a few priceless whoppers early in the film (“George Michael is a pimp who is all about the ladies, my friend!”). But after Ollie, stressed out by the demands of fatherhood, loses his cool at a public event and insults both his client and the assembled journalists, his career evaporates. In one of the movie’s funniest scenes, he shows up for a job interview after years in exile and discovers that his outburst has become an urban legend; the young players who invited him down (Smith regulars Matt Damon and Jason Lee) idolize him but have no intention of hiring him.
