Butler's Cinema Scene

John Carroll Lynch, Matt Bomer

“ANYTHING” My rating: C

94 minutes | MPAA rating: R

John Caroll Lynch, the bald character actor whose face everybody recognizes but whose name nobody knows (he was Frances Mcdormand’s waterfowl-painting hubby in “Fargo”), finally gets a shot at a leading man role in “Anything.”

He’s pretty good, but he’s fighting an uphill battle against writer/director Timothy McNeil’s stunningly heavy-handed script.

In the opening scenes things seem to be unfolding effectively.  Small-town Mississippi insurance agent Early Landry (Lynch)  is dealing with the traffic accident death of his beloved wife. The guy has two speeds: stoic and inconsolable.  Small wonder he ends up in the tub with his wrist slit.

His businesswoman sister from L.A. (Maura Tierney), sweeps in to take charge, relocating her Early to her family’s spacious home. But after a period of maladjustment — and a $500,000 insurance settlement —  he rents his own apartment in a rather dicey part of Hollywood.

Here’s where McNeil’s screenplay starts to go off the rails. For nobody within blocks, it seems, leads  anything like a normal life.

The unseen fellow who lives in the downstairs apartment gets boozed up and sings off key all night long. He, too, is mourning a lost spouse.

Brianna (Margot Bingham) spends most of the day sitting on the stoop smoking and awaiting the arrival of her ne’er-do-well musician boyfriend (Micah Hauptman), who cheats on her regularly…and sometimes in her presence. As a result Brianna exhibits a degree of mean cynicism unknown in Mississippi.

But, then, everyone in L.A. is afflicted with a form of sardonic sadism, according to this movie. Compared to the locals Early is as innocent as a baby.

He’s the kind of guy who can’t help looking out for his neighbors. So he finds himself interceding frequently on behalf of Freda (Matt Bomer, a Golden Globe winner for “The Normal Heart”), the trans prostitute across the hall. Freda seems always to be in trouble: beaten by a john, robbed of her rent money, hooked on drugs.

Initially Freda responds with the contempt indigenous to the area, cattily referring to the newcomer as “Andy Griffith’s sad brother” and mocking his every decent impulse.

She changes her tune when Early holds her hand and head through a home detox session. And when he shares with her old love letters from his late wife, she begins to look at this bumpkin as something of a white knight.

In short, they — SHOCKER — fall in love. You can imagine how well that goes down with the rest of Early’s family.

“Anything’s”  premise may not be conventional but it’s by no means impossible. This story could work.

But McNeil has such a tin ear for dialogue that the whole enterprise feels phony. Do people in Los Angeles really talk this way?

Lynch acquits himself well, finding and cultivating Early’s innate goodness (as well as his increasingly droll sense of humor). But he exhibits barely a trace of a Southern accent.

As Freda Bomer is borderline beautiful, but nobody could deliver those lines and get away with it.

| Robert W. Butler