By Robert Scucci | Updated
Imagine a world in which greeting card companies wield disproportionate power over their employees and use their resources to manipulate the masses, one seedy love letter at a time. This is the world Bob Odenkirk’s Ray Wentworth occupies in 2017. Friends partya romantic detective comedy as absurd as it is ambitious. Playing it straight as a legitimate crime drama loaded with deadpan dialogue, Friends party is as sweet as a box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day, and as slimy as a jilted ex-lover who cuts your tires when he realizes he left his Elliot Smith file at your house and he finds out you blocked his number when he tries to get it back. he.
Even though I wanted to like this film because I’ve been a fan of Odenkirk’s work since Mr. Show with Bob and DavidI can’t say it’s the Break the bad And You better call Saul the star’s finest hour. The storyboard is insane, but the concept itself would have been better served by a 30-minute runtime instead of stretching out over a 70-minute feature length film.
The writer’s dilemma
Friends party opens with Ray Wentworth (Bob Odenkirk), a recently divorced alcoholic greeting card writer working for AAAAA Greetings. Known for writing sweet words that are both concise and profound, Ray is a household name and his contributions to the greeting card industry are legendary. However, Cormac McCarthy once said that “if there’s an occupational hazard in writing, it’s drinking,” and Ray tends to get lost in the sauce more often than he is lucid, which leads to a serious bout of writer’s block and a fair amount of fainting. upon his dismissal from AAAAA Greetings.
Ray meets a former colleague, now homeless, named Taft (Larry Fessenden), who left the company to pursue a career as a novelist. Getting an all-too-real glimpse of his own future thanks to Taft, Ray knows he doesn’t have much time to get his life back on track.
The elaborate setup
Over the next three months, Girlfriends Day Chronology, Ray sinks into alcoholic depression. That is, until Ray is approached by his old boss, Stuyvesant (Alex Karpovsky). Stuyvesant explains that the state of California is holding a card-writing contest for a new company holiday called Girlfriend’s Day.
The only golden rule of the competition is this current greeting card employees aren’t allowed to participate, which means Ray is the perfect person to do the job.
When Ray sneaks into his old AAAA office to retrieve supplies, he finds Taft mortally wounded, bleeding from a stab wound. Waking up the next day on his couch after being knocked unconscious by an unseen assailant, Ray has a hazy memory of the events of the previous night.
After being confronted by a homicide detective named Miller (Kevin O’Grady), Ray meets a charming woman named Jill (Amber Tamblyn) and learns that she owns a greeting card store. Sparks quickly ignite between the two future lovers, and things begin to improve for Ray romantically.
Freshly smitten with a muse-like figure, Ray has a whole new set of problems to solve after learning that Miller works for both AAAAA Greetings and Paper Hearts, two rival greeting card companies that are both owned by the Gundys Brothers, Robert (Stacy Keach) and Dillon (never seen on screen). Warned by Miller that he will be charged with Taft’s murder if he does not comply with the wishes of the Gundy brothers, Ray finds himself in the middle of a grand conspiracy to ensure that the girlfriends’ party goes off without a hitch .
This should have been a comedy sketch
Friends party suffers from a serious problem that undermines its storytelling: it shouldn’t have been a movie. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve extolled the virtues of a tight runtime with a fast pace in the past, but only if the format makes sense for the story being told. In my mind, Friends party would have been an extended and powerful sketch living in the Mr. Show universe, much like the infamous and surreal 1994 sketch “Love and Sausages,” produced by Children in the room.
Friends party is, however, not without charm. Narrated by David Lynch and starring Steven Michael Quezada (Break the bad) as Ray’s grumpy landlord Munoz, it’s a well-acted piece of comedy with great chemistry among its leads, but leaves me wanting less, which in this case, would be more than enough to get its message.
You can broadcast Girlfriends Day on Netflix if drama, deception, and deadpan delivery sound like something you’re looking for in your life.
