She’s Funny That Way

The screenplay might not predate the age of the target audience for She’s Funny That Way, but it feels close.

It’s a screwball comedy that seems like it’s been dusted from a bygone era of Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch. Aside from a sprinkling of salty language and few shots of people on cell phones, it practically could go into immediate rotation on Turner Classic Movies.

Indeed, veteran director Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show) attracted a top-notch cast to his breezy Broadway farce. Yet while there’s a quaint nostalgic charm, the anachronistic script falls flat and ultimately yields more mild chuckles than big laughs.

The intertwining stories involve infidelity and life imitating art. It starts when a Broadway director (Owen Wilson) spends a night at a hotel with a neurotic escort (Imogen Poots). One of the actors (Rhys Ifans) in his next play spots the two together, and hatches a sinister plan to have the call girl audition for a role alongside the director’s wife (Kathryn Hahn). Meanwhile, the playwright (Will Forte) is having a fling with an ill-tempered therapist (Jennifer Aniston), and a former judge (Austin Pendleton) whose obsession with the same escort prompts him to hire an aging private detective (George Morfogen) to track her. And more connections are revealed as the new play nears its opening.

She’s Funny That Way marks the first theatrical feature in 14 years for Bogdanovich, who wrote the screenplay with his ex-wife, Louise Stratten (the couple divorced way back in 2001). It’s a romance without a hint of cynicism, which might sound refreshing but also yields its share of eye-rolling contrivances.

Episodic by nature, the film is probably most noteworthy for the eclectic cast, which includes cameo appearances by Richard Lewis, Cybill Shepherd (another of the director’s exes), Tatum O’Neal, Michael Shannon, and even Quentin Tarantino.

Several members of the ensemble lift the material with sharp comic timing, especially Wilson and Poots, who achieve an amusing chemistry. One of the best sequences features most of the main characters converging unexpectedly in a Manhattan restaurant, where their appearances leave some explaining to do.

But as for the film, Bogdanovich seems to be channeling low-grade Woody Allen material instead of relying on his own instincts. This is not a farce to be reckoned with.

Rated R, 93 minutes.