117 min | PG-13 | May 7, 2021 | Stage 6 Films
A dying comedy writer with early dementia befriends a singer who shows up to collect on a dead man’s auction prize. They have nothing in common except a willingness to keep showing up. The friendship is real. The movie around it is not.
Charlie Burnz is a veteran comedy writer in his seventies. His memory is failing and he knows it. He works a writers’ room he can no longer fully keep up with and he hides the diagnosis from the people who love him. Emma Payge enters his life by accident and stays by choice. The film wants to be about a friendship that asks nothing and gives everything, and it keeps reaching for a sentiment it has not earned.
Billy Crystal plays Charlie as a man performing competence while the floor drops out beneath him. The strongest moments are small. Charlie loses a word and covers for it. He stares at a familiar face he cannot place. Tiffany Haddish plays Emma as a singer with no filter and no agenda, and she calibrates her usual volume down to fit a quieter register. The two of them generate real warmth across a diner table, and the script keeps interrupting that warmth to explain itself.
Crystal directs from a screenplay he wrote with Alan Zweibel. The film cross-cuts between present-day Charlie and flashbacks to his late wife, and the editing leans on these inserts to manufacture emotion the scenes have not built. The flashbacks arrive softened and golden, lit to signal grief rather than to observe it. A subplot involving Charlie’s estranged children plays out in expository confrontations that state their wounds aloud. The structure tells the audience what to feel at every turn.
The problem is not the subject. A film about a writer losing the one tool he has built his life around is worth making. This version flinches from the cruelty of that loss and reaches instead for uplift. Every hard truth gets a softening line of dialogue or a swell of music. The friendship at the center deserves a movie with the nerve to leave it alone.