Movie Review: 'Bernard and Huey'

Bernard and Huey is based on a long lost script by Jules Feiffer, the famed cartoonist and the screenwriter of 1971’s Carnal Knowledge, a film directed by Mike Nichols. If you’re someone in my profession, you could have guessed, at the very least, that Bernard and Huey's director Dan Mirvish had seen Carnal Knowledge. Much of Bernard and Huey plays like a modernized take on the same characters in a slightly different frame.

Bernard and Huey stars Jim Rash and David Koechner as college best friends who’ve grown apart over the years. This doesn’t stop the now middle aged and overweight Huey from dropping in on Bernard in New York City out of the blue, looking for a place to stay. Huey is on the run from from his ex-family, his twenty-something daughter, Zelda (Mae Whitman) and his ex-wife, Aggie (Bellamy Young).

Bernard lets Huey stay though Bernard has no furniture in his apartment. Things have notably changed between Bernard and Huey. In college, Huey was the boisterous ladies man, determined to help his friend Bernard get laid, if such a thing were possible. Now, Bernard has a series of women rotating through his empty apartment, a symbol of his emotional emptiness, if you didn’t catch the metaphor.

Huey, meanwhile, appears homeless, or, at least without a permanent residence. He has money that he flashes around but he appears to have little else. He’s in New York City to see about family business but doesn’t appear interested. He’s come to Bernard to remind himself of a time when he mattered, when he was someone’s center of the universe, when someone actually looked up to him, even envied him.

That dynamic is no longer in place but over the course of this story, it begins to re-emerge. Just as Huey has invaded Bernard’s physical space, his apartment, he begins to enter his intellectual space. We watch as some of his problems become Bernard’s problems. This is most explicit when Bernard starts dating Zelda and the two carry on in a fashion that is creepily reflective of the disconnected relationship of Huey and Zelda.

There is love there, and fulfillment but also a deep sense of disappointment, and revenge plays no small role for either in this relationship. It’s not explicit but each seems comfortable hurting Huey’s feelings with this relationship, even as they are playing out a scenario that leaves them as alienated from each other as they were alienated from Huey. This relationship is the best part of Bernard and Huey because it is the stickiest, most tangled portion of this messy, lively comedy.

I'm wrestling with whether or not I enjoyed Bernard and Huey. The performances are good, Rash, Koechner and Whitman are on point, never letting on too much that they are fully aware of the dynamics unfolding. I also like that the script allows the characters to fool themselves much of the time, allowing subtext to be subtext and for us to sense it without needing to tell it to us or underline any points.

Carnal Knowledge always felt to me like it was underlining points. The pathetic nature of those characters, especially Nicholson’s Jonathan, who ends that film alone with a prostitute trying and perhaps failing to use his ego to move his libido. The film may as well be slam dunking on Jonathan’s aged misogynist, not that he doesn’t deserve it, it’s just a little easy, a little obvious. Easy and obvious are other ways I might describe Carnal Knowledge if I were being unkind.

Bernard and Huey is, at least, a little more complex in how it presents modest disdain for the immature characteristics of its characters, mostly Bernard. Bernard is presented much like the Sandy character in Carnal Knowledge but this film has a good deal more disdain for his childishness than Carnal Knowledge and Mike Nichols had for Sandy’s. Huey gets off rather easily by the end of the movie though it’s hard to imagine where any of these characters are headed by the end.

Do I like and recommend this movie? Bernard and Huey certainly has its charms. The performances are pro level and charismatic. The themes are well drawn and I did laugh a couple times. I don’t quite know why I am not completely sold on the movie. Perhaps it’s the ambiguous ending. It feels too simple. That said, there is, I guess, enough good here for me to recommend you see it for yourself. Perhaps you can find what I am missing.