Butler's Cinema Scene

Chris Rock, Julie Delpy

“2 DAYS IN NEW YORK” My rating: C+ (Now showing at the Tivoli)

96 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“2 Days in New York” is absolutely dispensable, but as time killers go it’s a pleasant enough diversion, being  a continuation of the story begun five years ago in “2 Days in Paris.”

Once again French actress Julie Delpy writes, directs and stars in a comedy, casting her own relations and friends as the friends and family of her fictional character.

“…Paris” was about a French girl, Marion (Delpy), bringing her American beau (Adam Goldberg) to meet her eccentric parents.  Playing the latter were Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, Delpy’s real-life parents.

The new film – obviously it takes place in NYC — starts with a puppet show  being acted out by Marion for the benefit of her young son. From this we learn that Marion is now divorced (the Adam Goldberg character, not seen here, lives just a few blocks away), that her mother is in heaven (indeed, Delpy’s real-life mother died in 2009) and that her father  and sister are coming to visit so that they can meet Marion’s new live-in beau.

That would be Mingus (Chris Rock), a music essayist and public radio deejay who has his own 8-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. He, Marion, her boy Lulu and his daughter Willow now happily cohabit in a Manhattan apartment.

It says something about Delpy’s love of screwball hilarity that Rock, the only genuine comedian in the cast, plays the straightest character. Many of the laughs are generated by Mingus’ flabberghasted

Chris Rock, Albert Delpy

reactions to the Gallic insanity in which he finds himself.

Albert Delpy’s Jeannot is like a leering Santa Claus with big appetites and a mischievous troublemaking streak. Also returning from the earlier film are Alexia Landeau as Marion’s sister, a child psychologist overflowing with neuroses and prone to walk about in various stages of undress.

She has brought with her (also from the first film) her ex-boyfriend Manu (Alexandre Nahon), a pot head insanely enthusiastic about anything American. He tells Mingus he wishes that he had been born black, but that since he’s Jewish it’s a close second.

Also returning from the original movie is German actor Daniel Bruhl, who played Marion’s overwrought ex back then, and now shows up on news broadcasts as a radical tree hugger who has taken up residence high in a Central Park grove.

The plot, such as it is, finds Marion desperately juggling family while trying to get ready for a gallery opening of her photos (they’re all self-portraits taken in bed). She’s also having a running feud with neighbors in an apartment building (Kate Burton, Dylan Baker), a conflict she tries to cool by letting them think she’s dying of a brain tumor.

None of this is particularly noteworthy (although Rock does get a nicely indignant monologue late in the proceedings), but it’s amusing in a take-it-or-leave-it way.

| Robert W. Butler