Dustin Hoffman might not have too many more films in him, but he is winding up his career on a personal high. In Tuner, also released this year, he stole the entire film as the kind and charismatic piano tuner everybody can’t help loving. In The Revisionist he pulls off the same heist in a more curmudgeonly part. Despite this excellence, The Revisionist is not a success – it tries to do too much and therefore succeeds at none of it – but we are here for Mr. Hoffman, and Mr. Hoffman alone.
Elise (Alison Brie) is a creative writing professor happily married to Jacob (Tom Sturridge). Jacob sold an app for millions so they live very well in an enormous house near campus (the movie was filmed in Kentucky but the fall-vibe campus could be anywhere). Elise spends a lot of time in her office working on her new novel, even though she is badly stuck and Ms Brie is very bad at fake typing. Jacob’s father David (Mr. Hoffman) lives across town and is adamant he needs no caretaking, meaning Jacob rolls his eyes and does the caretaking anyway. Jacob’s current project is a memoir about his mother’s death when he was a toddler, but David is refusing to help with the research. The memoir has a guaranteed audience, since David was the author of a great American novel before abandoning his literary work to bring Jacob up after his wife’s death. In retirement, David’s priority is staying toasted all day, and he’s pretty great at that.
But! John (Andre Holland III), who Elise and Jacob were close friends with in college, reappears. He’s been off-grid for fifteen years, but now he is in town and that unexplained absence is not weird at all. John is also a writer, with a single short story published in The New Yorker before he vanished. Over a happy reunion dinner which includes a vape pen full of weed, Jacob tells John about David’s strange refusal to help with the memoir. John offers to spend time with David, secretly recording him in order to give Jacob the information he needs about his mother. Elise and Jacob think this is a terrific idea and nothing could possibly go wrong. That story was evidently so good that the editor of The New Yorker, June (Roxanne Hart), still takes John’s calls; thanks to this sudden access he pitches her an article on David, who is still so important The New Yorker jumps all over this immediately. So the beloved old friend is suddenly a snake in the grass. And seeing how easy all this is for everybody here, anyone with a less successful literary career will either laugh or cry.
As in After the Hunt, such a rosy picture of academia is painted that it’s hard to believe anything anyone says. Sydney Marquez’s production design leans into comfortable luxury and fails to provide either Elise and Jacob or David with any books in their home. There’s also so much casual drug use that it seems even fairly hard drugs are an ordinary weeknight pastime for the American middle class. But the biggest problem is that the plot twists are so boring that the only question is what writer-director Alex Vlack was actually trying to accomplish. On consideration The Revisionist wants to be about how our stories shape our identity. Who are we, if none of our friends know where we are? Who are we, if our life is a lie? Who are you, if the people are manipulating you for their own purposes? How can anybody really know who they are?
The thing is there are some clear answers to those questions, but not the way The Revisionist asks them. It means you spend the last half of the movie mainly watching Mr. Hoffman act everyone else off the screen. As David wheedles and whines and chats and charms, we all get a fantastic reminder of what a real movie star can do. The fact the others can’t keep up is not their fault, although Ms. Brie should have dialed down Elise’s air of amused detachment, which reads as contemptuous instead of observant. The autumnal sheen of comfort over everything is disturbed by nothing at all, which makes it very hard to care about the issues raised here. But we care very much about Mr. Hoffman, and that means The Revisionist is worth embracing, just for him.
The Revisionist recently played at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Tribeca site for the title.
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