Ferrell flops as leading man

So, a colleague comes up to my desk the other day, causing me to have to pull off my headphones …

… I had been listening to the “Garden State” soundtrack, by the way …

… and he starts in on Hollywood. He talks about the stories he’s been reading about all the whining and moaning that the film industry is doing because of falling box-office returns.

Example: A May 9 story from www.cbs.com reported that “The top 12 movies grossed $76.9 million, down 24 percent from last year at this time when ‘Van Helsing’ and ‘Mean Girls’ were the top movies.”

“What do they expect?” asks my colleague. “Give me something worth watching and I’ll go.”

Insert a grunt of agreement here.

On Sunday afternoon, after returning from a two-week trip out of the country, I tried to catch up on some moviegoing by going to see the Will Ferrell comedy “Kicking & Screaming.” I might have picked something more interesting – “Crash,” maybe, or “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” – but this was one of Friday’s openers, and I had to see it for the Spokane Public Radio show that I’m a part of.

On leaving the theater, I turned to my wife and said, “Well, that was better than I expected.”

Which says just about everything you need to know about today’s movies, doesn’t it? I seldom expect something great when I go to the theater anymore. It’s enough that I’m not disappointed.

“Kicking & Screaming” is a good case study. It’s billed as a Ferrell film, and, yes, the former “Saturday Night Live” star is the protagonist. He plays an “Everybody Loves Raymond”-type wimp of a husband and father who can’t handle his emotionally abusive father (played by Robert Duvall).

Things change, though, when he recruits his father’s equally boorish neighbor (played by Mike Ditka) to teach him how to be a “winner.” As a gerbil on Xanax would predict, “winning” becomes so important that Ferrell’s character turns into the same kind of guy that his father is.

Until the Big Lesson comes along, which …

Note: Spoiler ahead.

… allows him to become a better man AND win the big game.

Question: How is it that Ferrell has lost his sense of freshness so soon? Until he broke out in 2003 with “Elf,” Ferrell had been mostly a featured player in films. And as such, his personal brand of earnest ridiculousness added just the right touch to the overall project. Think “Old School.”

But then he became a leading man, and things began to go wrong. “Elf” was funny enough. But “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” wasn’t nearly as funny as it might have been, and “Kicking & Screaming” is pretty much the same. Both movies play more the way that most SNL skits do – a concept that ends up feeling like a bunch of individual gags pasted together instead of being a single flowing story line.

And those gags end up being centered on Ferrell playing the clown, sometimes not very well. In “Kicking & Screaming,” he does coffee-shop gags that would have felt dated the day after Starbucks became synonymous with second- rate espresso.

The best things about “Kicking & Screaming” are the presences of Duvall (an Oscar-winning actor) and Ditka (coach of, as the movie makes only too clear, the 1985 Super Bowl Champion Chicago Bears). Neither is a naturally gifted comic, but their intensity – playing off Ferrell’s farce – is what gives the film whatever real tension that it has.

Tension, or virtually any other sense of complication, is uncommon for a contemporary comedy. Its presence, if nothing else, makes “Kicking & Screaming” better than the theatrical trailers would lead you to believe.

Hmmmm, a movie proving better than its trailer. Even that’s become too hard to expect.

It’s hard enough simply to hope it might be true.

Head west, young moviegoer

Here are some of the highlights of the Seattle International Film Festival’s opening weekend (tickets were still available at press time):

9 tonight, Broadway Performance Hall: “Twist of Faith,” Oscar-nominated documentary about the Catholic sex-abuse scandal.

6:30 p.m. Saturday, Harvard Exit: “Mad Hot Ballroom,” documentary about New York City fifth-graders learning to dance.

9:30 p.m. Saturday, The Egyptian: “Yasmin,” British film about a Pakistani woman struggling in a post-9/11 Northern England.

4 p.m. Sunday, Broadway Performance Hall: “An Afternoon with Joan Allen,” conversation with the three-time Oscar- nominated actress.

To buy tickets for SIFF 2005, go to www.seattlefilm.org/festival or call (206) 324-9996.