Movie Review ~ First Time Female Director

Hollywood can sometimes be its own worst enemy. It wants to have its cake and eat it too in that it loves to skewer itself and not be taken too seriously but then turns around and creates supposed entertainment that wants credibility. Over the years, there have been a handful of films that have walked that fine line to great success, with the most prominent examples being Robert Altman’s wicked 1992 The Player to Tropic Thunder, a 2008 film I haven’t seen since it first came out but remember appreciating it’s willingness to take no prisoners in Tinseltown. Look a little off the beaten path, and you’ll come across the gems like Steve Martin’s 1991 comedy L.A. Story and the even more obscure 1988 Kevin Bacon flick, The Big Picture (a near spoof directed by Christopher Guest before he went full mockumentarian on us).

First Time Female Director attempts to join the ranks of films that have hit their target but winds up missing by a mile, lacking the sharp irony and biting wit that made the movies it’s trying to sidle up to so memorable.  Instead of dissecting the ridiculousness of an industry and unraveling the chaos behind the scenes of a theatrical life, writer/director Chelsea Peretti’s picture is a bleak dud.  It’s a further reminder that as subjective as comedy can be, the material must be polished before presenting it to an audience. After all, this isn’t amateur night.

Rehearsals are about to begin for ‘Rain’s Comin’ In.’, a new show by aspiring writer Sam (Peretti, Game Night) at a small Los Angeles theater company when she is sat down for a good news/bad news discussion.  According to Artistic Director Sheldon (Andy Richter, 80 for Brady), the bad news is that the play’s director (Tim Heidecker, Spin Me Round) has been fired for inappropriate conduct. The good news is that the company wants her to direct. Without any prior experience but wanting to salvage the potentially sinking ship of her big break, she agrees to take the show’s reins and jump into rehearsals.

From the first read-through, we can tell that she’s in over her head. She struggles to manage the diverse cast, including dramatic theater pot stirrer Rudy (Benito Skinner), over-trained amateur Clara (Kate Berlant, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), tech-addicted Davina (Meg Stalter, Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain), veteran Marjory (Megan Mullally, Dicks: The Musical), acting sage Simon (the late Jak Knight), and the company’s esteemed but minor-credited Corden (Blake Anderson, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse). She also must deal with a jealous usher (Max Greenfield, Promising Young Woman) who believes he should be playing a more pivotal role at the theater and will go to great lengths to prove it and box office staff member Xosha Roquemore (a standout in a stalwart otherwise lackluster ensemble) who is harboring theatrical ambitions of her own.

With ponderous rehearsals leading into a disastrous tech period that gives way to a cast mutiny, it gradually becomes clear that Sam’s first play and directing gig may be her last. As opening night draws near, she starts to meet the cast at their level, realizing too late that by relinquishing her power dynamic, she’s given up part of herself. As she pushes through lingering self-doubt toward a motivating epiphany, Sam leans on her theatricality to get her to that first performance in front of an audience.

Peretti’s premise holds promise, locking into the whirlwind of emotions a life in the theater can provide, and she’s assembled a gallery of players from the top tier of the comedy world. Aside from the main cast, there is a bevy of cameos that indicated Peretti wasn’t above leaning on some famous friends (including her Oscar-winning husband, Jordan Peele) to stop by and shoot for an hour or two. Amy Poehler, Moxie, produced this and has a small co-starring role, so I’m sure she helped, too. With all these pieces in place, what follows should be a riotous exploration of stagey unrest, yet the screenplay’s attempts at humor consistently fall flat, leaving the audience craving substance.

As the potential quickly vanishes with the overuse of a slow-motion effect, which resembles an outdated anti-drug PSA from the early ’90s, and a lack of inventive direction from Peretti, you can’t help but analyze the narrative that lacks cohesion and, worse…laughs. I think I counted about three solid laughs in the entire film, and two of them happen so close to the end of the ninety-minute run time that I’m guessing most viewers will miss them because they haven’t stuck around to finish the film. Compounding the problems of the low-budget production are missing pieces of character arcs that give little context to who any of these people are before we meet them.  How can we judge how much Peretti’s character changes if we weren’t given the chance to know her before she was almost forcibly thrust into the role of the show’s director? 

I’ve seen and liked Peretti in countless films and television series (she gets the single biggest laugh, an outtake that made the final cut, in the dreadful 2020 film Friendsgiving), so I know she’s got a gift for timing. That’s why I can’t figure out what went so wrong here.  Her good instincts seem to have been left at home, casualties of her script that never can deliver genuine laughs.  Even the fleeting moments of humor latch on to been-there, done-that gags or clichés, which overshadow the cast’s talents. It’s when Peretti ditches the obvious humor for more subversive commentary on the state of the theatrical landscape and the gaps that exist from a gender and race perspective that things start to fire up. Sadly, First Time Female Director isn’t comfortable staying on this path, even for the briefest moments.

The entertainment industry (film, TV, theater) is eccentric no matter what level you are coming in on. Squandering an opportunity to make a meal from this meaty subject, First Time Female Director is disappointingly dull and needs more inspiration to pursue an incisive critique that would have made it much funnier. Instead, we’re subjected to stupefyingly unfunny passages with usually funny performers that uniformly miss the mark. Standing out for all the wrong reasons, here’s hoping that for Peretti’s next gig, she takes the most successful parts of First Time Female Director (i.e., the articulate observational humor) and expands that into something worth a second glance.