The author made a mistake ★★½
COMEDY (2022)
Directed by: Michael Maren
Cast: Michael Shannon, Kate Hudson, Don Johnson.

great actor Michael Shannon manages to make a fairly typical comedy about the writing world interesting with his performance. The organizers of a college literary festival invite Shriver, a well-known but hidden writer for decades, to the event. However, the invitation is accidentally delivered to a man of the same name, who spends most of the day drinking and mourning his wife who has left him. However, he decides to go to the festival, where he is greeted by (almost) everyone, most notably the beautiful professor (Kate Hudson), who is fascinated by his strange character.

An ordinary mortal with the same name as a famous but forgotten writer receives an invitation to a festival and decides to go there, pretending to be the official guest.

Michael Maren’s film begins with the simple plot of a swindler who pretends to be someone else in order to make sense of his stuffy life, if only for a moment. Then, however, there comes a twist as the fake Shriver comes more and more into the role, somehow “communicating” with the absent writer. At the festival itself, you can meet various stereotypical characters of the spirit: an alcoholic poet who naturally becomes a bosom friend of the protagonist, a vain playwright, an African American, a militant feminist lyricist, and so on. And Kate Hudson’s character represents women trying to make their creative voice heard in a (still) male-dominated environment.

“In this void, a human comedy unfolds, the difference between what we allow ourselves to think and what we know deep down. The film is set in a rundown and struggling literary festival where a group of writers gather. Each member tries to look the way they hope the rest of the world will see them.

At the center of it all is Shriver, a writer so successful and so stuck in his own insecurities that he’s cut off from himself but forced to pretend he’s really himself. As Kurt Vonnegut (American writer) says: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about who we pretend to be,” says director Michael Maren. This concept of pretense, so prevalent in today’s social media world, is perhaps the most interesting element of his film.