A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018)

Directed by: David Wain | 101 minutes | biography, comedy | Actors: Will Forte, Annette O’Toole, Harry Groener, Martin Mull, David Wain, Domhnall Gleeson, Ben F. Campbell, Jon Klaft, Camille Guaty, Brad Morris, Carla Gallo, Ed Helms, Jackie Tohn, Jon Daly, Seth Green John Gemberling, Rick Glassman, Joel McHale, Emmy Rossum, Max Greenfield, Armen Weitzman, Lonny Ross, Joe Lo Truglio, Finn Wittrock

Famous universities seem to be a breeding ground for famous comedy. Maybe not in the Netherlands, but in England and America. For example, 5 out of 6 members of the legendary Monty Python were alumni of Oxford and Cambridge. The Harvard Lampoon, a comic student magazine (founded in 1876), was the spiritual father of the American phenomenon National Lampoon. That phenomenon was again so successful that it led to an even more successful spin-off, the television show ‘Saturday Night Live’.

We see how it all came to be in the comic biopic ‘A Futile and Stupid Gesture’. In it, in the late 1960s, we meet Doug Kenney, a shy college student who meets the slightly less shy intellectual Henry Beard at Harvard. Together they end up at the Harvard Lampoon, where they are responsible for the successful Tolkien parody ‘Bored of the Rings’. To take things on a bigger scale, the duo set up National Lampoon, a magazine, radio show and touring comedy revue. After which feature film and Hollywood beckon.

‘A Futile and Stupid Gesture’ is mainly the biography of the troubled Doug Kenney, but also about the friendship between Kenney and Beard. We experience the anarchic conditions at the student magazine, the great successes at National Lampoon and finally the estrangement between the friends. The humor is the same as that of the magazines: a special cross between flat and intelligent, silly and genius, over the top and very over the top. With a lot of sex and drugs and alcohol. And with an unforgettable cover of a dog with a gun to his dog’s head, accompanied by an equally unforgettable text.

‘A Futile and Stupid Gesture’ is a film that relies on humour, the era and the cheerful style: a dramatic scene presented as a photo strip, a child who begins to speak with an adult voice. All very funny and in the spirit of the subject. However, this film always remains on the safe side. It’s an off-the-book biopic that starts (and doesn’t) start with a trauma, then ticks all the boxes. The film also chooses the clichés from the time periods shown, from the free hippie culture of the 60s to the sniffing Hollywood at the time of Hotel California. All that doesn’t make ‘A Futile and Stupid Gesture’ a bad film, but it doesn’t make it the comedic hit it could have been.