“CEREMONY.” | Comedy
R. 1 hour 29 minutes. At the Denver FilmCenter/Colfax.
With his odd red suit, lumpen mustache and constant stream of self-promoting patter, Sam Davis (Michael Angarano) is an irritant of the highest order. He’s the guy at the party who thinks like an operator and acts like a boob but still, for reasons no one can comprehend, leaves with a hot one on his arm.
Annoying, right? Fortunately — for us and for the seriocomic “Ceremony” — Angarano invests the pesky Sam with a self-absorption so transparent and childlike that you might mistake it for charm. He’s saved from total jerkiness by two traits: his undying love for Zoe (Uma Thurman), who’s engaged to marry someone else; and an infinitesimal splinter of self-awareness, which suggests that he might, be a candidate for redemption.
Or, short of that, remorse.
This makes “Ceremony” an interesting debut feature for writer-director Max Winkler, son of Henry, alias the Fonz, a.k.a. the pop-cultural standard-bearer for cool and unconflicted American masculinity.
Winkler brings a mindfulness to the film, and a playfulness with language, that atones for some of its less-promising notions.
The setting is the bucolic seaside manse where Zoe plans to marry Whit (Lee Pace), an Oscar-winning filmmaker who specializes in African documentaries that require him to appear shirtless. Whit is a handsome and happy narcissist.
Pace’s performance is the film’s most elastic and least encumbered, a welcome antidote to the angsty dramatic clashes that erupt as the plot noodles toward a close.
Like its protagonist, “Ceremony” is as smart as it is exasperating. Winkler’s literary bent is obvious, self-mocking and generally witty; he’s amused by conventions and exploits them to suit his fancy.
