[rating=6.00]
In comedy, there’s a fine line between brilliance and shtick. While it’s true that a shtick can be brilliant, everything has a shelf life, and even the most brilliant shtick gets old given enough time. The annals of comedy are filled with performers who rose to great heights only to fizzle out and fade into nothingness. So, too, with movies. A shtick will only carry you so far; beyond that, you’ll need something more if you want to stay memorable.
The Bronze is a movie rife with shtick. It’s an effective shtick, but it’s shtick nonetheless. As such, it’s recommended that the film be approached with a degree of caution—the entire premise is laid out fairly directly in the preview, and I’ll leave it up to the individual to decide if it’s something they can get behind. However, The Bronze does manage to walk the fine line between shtick and heart well enough to keep the movie from descending into awful and is, if you don’t mind copious use of the word fuck, quite often hilarious.
Melissa Rauch stars as Hope, a small town bronze medalist for gymnastics who has aged out of the sport but failed to mature into adulthood. She lays about, mooching off her father (a glorious Gary Cole) and relying on her minor celebrity to get whatever she wants from the denizens of her tiny, Midwestern town. She steals, she lies, she does drugs. She’s the embodiment of that one person everyone knows who never quite got over their adolescence and consciously elects a state of arrested development. As her father’s finances begin to falter, she is threatened with being cut off and forced to find a job. Serendipitously, her former coach dies suddenly and Hope is given the opportunity to inherit $500,000 if and only if she coaches young Maggie (Haley Lu Richardson) to the 2016 Olympics.
Rauch serves double duty here, having also co-wrote the screenplay with husband Winston Rauch. The script manages to find a balance—shaky though it may be—between pure raunch and heartfelt which manages to elevate the simplistic story beyond pure shtick. There are moments of comedic brilliance hidden within the barrage of f-bombs and toilet humor, just as there are moments of raw emotionalism.
To an extent, this is both a boon and a curse to The Bronze. While the difficulty of walking the line cannot be overstated, at times it felt as though the script wasn’t sure what it wanted to be exactly. I couldn’t help thinking that it might be better if they hadn’t committed completely to a single direction and gone with that. Sometimes the raunchy jokes got in the way of the emotional drama while other times the emotional drama lessened the impact of the raunchy jokes.
Still, none of it ever fails, exactly. The raunch is really raunchy and the drama is really heartfelt. Any commitment the script failed to have was not a problem for the cast, who handle the balancing act deftly and admirably. Rauch in particular displays a level of dry wit that is utterly belied by the obscenity of her character, and if nothing else it makes me want to see more of what she can do outside of the confines of The Big Bang Theory.
She’s balanced perfectly by the young Richardson, whose bubbly enthusiasm serves as the perfect foil for Hope’s callous exterior. Thomas Middleditch (Silicon Valley) is delightful enough as Ben, Hope’s former coach’s partner who helps Maggie’s training, and Sebastian Stan (Captain America: Civil War) gives a pitch perfect performance as Hope’s former and current rival. Stan oozes with douchebaggery, and quickly becomes a character we love to hate, even though he’s clearly in the right most of the time.
While I don’t know that The Bronze can rightly be considered “memorable,” it’s a solid effort that hits all the right beats and is genuinely very funny (there’s even a jaw dropping sex scene that rivals the absurdity of Team America’s). What you see is what you get with The Bronze, and you’re either going to be completely turned off or completely behind the movie. I suspect more will be turned off than not, but that’s okay. The film never tries to be for everyone, nor does it try to be anything other than what it is.
What it is is a solid, if flawed, indie comedy that’s honestly better than I expected it to be. Rauch has a clear talent that has yet to be fully tapped, and I can’t wait to see what else she’s got in that head of hers. As a starting point, The Bronze is good enough. Next time, however, she might just get the gold.
The Bronze is now playing in theaters everywhere.
