The Notorious Newman Brothers

(Canada - 2009)

Sometimes it seems as though every guy believes they could be a filmmaker or a gangster, with the exception of those who would obviously have no trouble being both! The Notorious Newman Brothers examines how pop culture shapes our consciousness to prefer the former to the later. Though it would be a mistake to take this mocumentary seriously, one of the more interesting and successful aspects of the film is the way it shows that losers are able to do such a good job using pop culture references to mask the misery of their pathetic lives they may not even realize how lame they actually are.

Your enjoyment of The Notorious Newman Brothers is likely to center upon whether you find a documentary by the world’s worst filmmaker about the world’s two least convincing gangsters who, despite that fact, spend the entire movie making narcissistic, self aggrandizing claims about being big time hoods painfully funny, or just simply painful. I find the concept to be interesting, and though I admire the film more for actually trying to go through with its concept - which makes a lot more sense with a last reel reveal - with some genuine authenticity, there are definitely moments when masochism is all that keeps you from fast forwarding.

The basic problem with the Notorious Newman Brothers is, despite the nod to Chaplin, the comedy is entirely derived from the dialogue. Most scenes have a couple truly hilarious jokes, but although the interplay between the Newman Brothers is good, the problem with the movie is there’s little beyond the self promotion and one upsmanship of the brothers, who basically just try to one up each other in between bragging and riffing on each other and Chaplin. I love Eric Rohmer movies, but it takes an amazing talent to sustain the audience’s attention strictly through dialogue, and this sort of is actually that much harder than his poetic dramas, since comedy is, for the most part, really all they are after. For me, the problem isn’t so much that there’s really nothing going on to distract us, but rather that this fact makes them have to struggle to make every second a joke. There’s not a great deal of setup, and the whole enterprise doesn’t really feel organic despite the faux improv of the never ending banter.

The Notorious Newman Brothers is an episodic “documentary”, utilizing the framing device of building each segment around a gangster movie theme, introduced through a famous quote from a Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, or Francis Ford Coppola movie. On the surface, the filmmakers are simply making jokes about the various aspects of the gangster genre, but beyond providing cannon fodder, the importance of these themes lies in the relation between the fans – gangsters Thunderclap (Brett Butler) and Paulie Newman (Jason Butler) – and their concept of the gangster life attained through the osmosis of having watched every GoodFellas, The Godfather, Carlito’s Way, Mean Streets, Scarface, & Donnie Brasco. Ryan Noel’s film is ultimately taking theoretical polar opposites, the wimpy, timid, tepid mama’s boy “director” Max Chaplin (played by Noel) and the infamous and feared womanizing ex-convict hoods the Newman Brothers and, after 80 minutes of blurring reality and fantasy, making them inseparable and indistinguishable icons of perpetual adolescence.

Chaplin actually came into contact with his subjects by placing an add looking for someone who wanted a documentary made about them, and half the comedy lies in just how ridiculous the whole enterprise and evil alliance between the two sides is. The self proclaimed 5th degree murderers spend most of the running time trying to convince the director they are as big and bad as they claim to be, almost all through word rather than action. They are sure to drag him into their various nefarious activities, including such glamorous and important activities as breaking into a neighbors home... to steal the necessary Italian food ingredients for tonight’s dinner!

The Butler’s takes the gangster stereotypes such as homophobia, racism, and sexism beyond the extreme, but direct most of them back at the perpetrators. My favorite segment involves Thunderclap Newman’s attempts to look intimidating for the big drug deal. First he wears an eye patch, which makes him look like a gay pirate until he puts it over his glasses, and later, since Paulie wouldn’t let him wear that, he goes Lon Chaney, using movie makeup to give himself a fake scar (Scarface is tough, after all).

In the end, there is enough absurdity to the various segments to make the film worth watching, but one still feels there was a lot of unrealized potential because on one hand the Butler’s are very funny, but on the other hand they haven’t really harnessed and shaped their comic skills into something that flows together, functioning as a whole.

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