Philip wordy, wonderful

This might be the best example of what an audience-specific is and should be like, at least for 2014. Listen Up Philip is the ultimate homage to 1970s cinema for and about New York intellectuals. If you grew up reading Philip Roth but still love some of the modern sensibilities of Wes Anderson, well … you’ll be right at home here.

It’s the new film from writer/director Alex Ross Perry, a rising talent who might struggle a bit with his pacing, but so did Roth and frankly, it was always the tone and the loquaciousness that were primary concerns over all else.

The story revolves around Philip Lewis Friedman (Jason Schwartzman), the egocentric, argumentative and generally unpleasant author of a successful novel as he struggles to accommodate everything in his life on the verge of the release of his second novel, Obidant. To wit: his relationship with his girlfriend Ashley, (Elisabeth Moss), who is establishing herself as a successful photographer, is firmly on the rocks, mostly thanks to his bitterly lackadaisical care of people and general insouciance towards anything that doesn’t serve his idiosyncratic interests.

There are other people in his life that he just couldn’t care less for also, like his former writing partner from college, the one who didn’t achieve as much as he did, despite the youthful promises and earnest pledges. Philip doesn’t hesitate to berate him for not overcoming his life’s challenges to become the writer he always wanted to be. After the public berating, Philip remains satisfied while his former friend wheelchairs off into the distance.

Luckily, Philip manages to strike up a friendship with Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), the celebrated writer of numerous influential novels. The aged mentor offers the young apprentice the opportunity to sequester himself in a country abode in order to escape the pressures and disappointments of city life while focusing on his writing.

Of course, nothing ever goes as planned, especially when Zimmerman and his daughter Melanie (Krysten Ritter) unexpectedly tag along for the ride. Honestly, you sit down for this movie and you’re in for a novel’s worth of words, thanks to the really brilliant script and the helpful literary device of a narrator, here played (much as a man simply reading a book) by Eric Bogosian.

There’s a psychological absurdity to how much dialogue has to transpire in order to move the plot forward, except that it is all absolutely necessary. You could condense the same number of words from a two-and-a-half-hour Michael Bay explosion fest into this 110-minute talk-up and not even achieve nearly one-quarter of the wonder and bemusement.

There are several reasons why this movie excels, and they include the stellar casting, the superlative acting, the spot-on writing and the note perfect 1970s jazzy metropolitan piano score. Schwartzman, Moss, Pryce and Ritter truly make this film a delight to behold.

If you want to base a movie off of not a book but an atmosphere of writers of a specific period in the not too distant past, this is literally the greatest tribute that you could come up with. Viewers must pay attention though because there’s a lot of personal and interpersonal psychology being discussed between Philip et al.

Honestly, it’s wonderful at first but gets to be just a bit way too much by about half an hour in. Perhaps it’s just been too long since I read Portnoy’s Complaint.