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After spoofing offstage politics in the delightful Wag the Dog, the partnership of director Barry Levinson and Robert De Niro traded in Dustin Hoffman for a horde of all-stars to emanate a satirical spell over Hollywood itself with What Just Happened, a tale of gluttony, covetousness, and two-facedness. This all sounds divine - a star vehicle for the greatest actor ever, comedic supporting roles for Bruce Willis, John Turturro and Sean Penn, and the latter's wife in a cougarish return to form - but heavyweight producer Art Linson's memoirs never fully translate on screen. With two emotionally confused ex-wives, a troubled teenage daughter, deceitful friends galore, an artistically feral English director who likes to shoot miscast actors shooting dogs in the head for mass consumption, unmanageable stars, ferocious studio executives, and two films in serious jeopardy from tanking worldwide as a result of all of the above, De Niro's Ben, a producer on the verge of meltdown, simply has too much on his plate for a picture marketed as a quickie inside story. Filmgoers want the backstage juice, not the awkward subplots only present to fill time.
Of course, De Niro et al pull off the vital undertones of insincere hypocrisy to a standard almost impossible to criticize. After all, Linson is writing about Hollywood, California, the homestead of the industry devoid of compassion and who better to lampoon the intricacies of how the machine works than its residents? As insiders the assemblage do a great job of vilifying their occupations but Levinson flits between scenes and comedic setups like a sitcom where the core demographic is littered with people exercising short attention spans. In other words, we never have the chance to familiarise ourselves with characterisation of any kind because Linson and Levinson have decided to put the industry itself into the spotlight. The only chance the audience has to look into the window of Ben's soul is when he is driving around the endless arteries of the Los Angeles Interstate system or down Sunset Boulevard in his luxurious Porsche 4x4. Even then, these artificial vistas are more fly-on-the-wall documentary style than stereotypical plot continuation methods.
The summary
Peculiarly, it's a tricky task in itself to explain how Levinson's dalliance into satire could be improved. Indeed, 'dalliance' is an appropriate term to describe the whole affair - a playful flirtation with an exposé lacking the bite of the source material.
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