98 min | R | May 12, 2023 | Roadside Attractions
Latte Pronto leaves a mental institution mute and blank, and Hollywood mistakes his emptiness for genius. He becomes a movie star without saying a word or wanting any of it. Charlie Day spends a whole film telling a joke that he forgets to write a punchline for.
Latte Pronto is a man with no words and no ambition. A studio plucks him off the street because he resembles a difficult leading man, and he stumbles into fame because he never asks for it. The film wants to be a silent-comedy fable about the emptiness at the center of celebrity. Charlie Day builds the whole movie on a premise that a mute innocent passes through a corrupt industry and absorbs its delusions. The idea is that Hollywood projects meaning onto a blank face. The script never decides what that blankness is supposed to mean.
Charlie Day plays Latte as a wide-eyed cipher who reacts to everything and initiates nothing. The performance is committed and physical, but it gives the other actors no surface to play against. Ken Jeong plays Lenny the Publicist as a desperate hanger-on who narrates his own importance and supplies the film its only consistent pulse. Kate Beckinsale plays Christiana Dior as a vain starlet, and Jason Sudeikis plays Lex Tanner as a preening action lead, but both are sketches rather than people. Adrien Brody, Ray Liotta, and Edie Falco appear as industry archetypes and exit before the film does anything with them. Every actor commits, and the script gives each one a single note.
Charlie Day writes and directs his first feature, and he stages it as a series of vignettes strung along Latte’s rise and fall. The episodic structure is the central problem. Scenes arrive, deliver one gag, and cut away before any joke compounds into a second one. The editing favors quick exits over comic build, so the film never lets a bit breathe long enough to land. A silent protagonist demands precise visual comedy and rhythmic timing, and the cutting here delivers neither.
Day clearly loves the silent-era comedies he is imitating, and the affection shows in the framing and the gentle period-pastiche score. The affection is not enough. A satire of Hollywood needs a target and a point of view, and this film offers a blank man wandering past easy caricatures of vanity and greed. The jokes about the industry are the jokes everyone already makes. Day proves he can compose a frame and direct actors, and he proves he had no script worth shooting.