PIPE DREAM

Martin Donovan brings too much intelligence and class to a role that by definition requires very little, and the combination proves to be naggingly dissatisfying.

Martin Donovan's specialty is for playing characters who are smarter than those surrounding him, and who just overall have their shit together. With his singular ability to exude a sense of control over the situation, Donovan positively owns any scene he's a part of. As it turns out, this inclination is more than a specialty—it's more like a necessity.

In Pipe Dream, Donovan portrays David Kulovic, a lowly plumber who, while hanging around with his casting director friend RJ (Kevin Carroll), notices that beautiful women seem to be blindly attracted to movie directors. David concocts a plan to masquerade as a director in order to attract these beautiful women, since his status as a plumber prevents them from even acknowledging his existence. While selling this idea to RJ, David whines about what a handicap people's "perception categories" are (in the film's funniest line, RJ, who is black, responds, "Do you really think you need to talk to ME about 'perception categories'?"). Stealing a script from his neighbor (Mary-Louise Parker), they put the plan into action and hold fake auditions, but it goes farther than they ever imagined when a producer offers $2 million to finance the film. Soon, the film begins production and David has his eyes on the movie's attractive young starlet—and not much else.

Donovan brings too much intelligence and class to a role that by definition requires very little, and the combination proves to be naggingly dissatisfying. Donovan as a crass womanizer? Does not compute. His co-stars don't fare much better. Mary-Louise Parker has an impeccable gift for comic timing, and provides most of the laughs in the film, but she can't save the surprisingly large amount of duds among the lines she's been given here. In fact, the laugh/joke ratio as a whole is pretty disappointing. There are several moments of amusement and some small laughs here and there, but the whole follow-through of the premise isn't handled with the proper amount of wicked glee that should accompany such a plot. It's not that the jokes are bad, they're just... lifeless.

Pipe Dream does have several things working in its favor, including a realistic happy ending that resists most of the clichés this genre tends to cling to. It handles a development in which David is revealed as a con quite well. It also has a great premise, and certainly isn't boring—but it could have made for a dynamite film had the script fully explored both its comic and dramatic potential. It has its moments, and it earns the rating I gave it.

But how ironic that Pipe Dream itself seems to be a bit of a front—an assembly of all the right parts needed to make a witty, enjoyable romantic comedy, but each part just a little too flimsy to elevate Pipe Dream from typical, blandly pleasant, but forgettable romantic comedy status.