Earlier this year, Chris Pine suffered a major blow in the neverending (and probably mostly imaginary) battle of the Hollywood Chrises. Weighed down by neither weird overtones nor mid-career malaise, and as the only major Chris unencumbered by a long history with Marvel, Pine has cultivated a nontoxic cool-guy rep. In recent years, he’s happily played second fiddle to Wonder Woman, had some fun in the Dungeons & Dragons movie, and made some unabashedly grown-up-targeted pictures like Don’t Worry Darling and All the Old Knives. But when presented with the opportunity to communicate his broader vision of the world, or at least of Hollywood, Pine belly-flopped. Poolman, the movie he directed, co-wrote, produced, and starred in, received savage reviews in its Toronto Film Festival debut last fall. The movie was nonetheless released in theaters this spring, making all of $131,000 on its opening weekend before tracking its financial performance stopped entirely. Now it’s arrived on Hulu, presumably on its way to a longer what-the-hell-is-this run on Tubi or Pluto.
Why Watch Poolman Tonight?
Poolman is a shaggy, sun-baked Los Angeles noir, half character study and half genre parody, very much in the tradition of private-detective variations like The Long Goodbye, The Big Lebowski, and Under the Silver Lake. Chinatown is heavy in the mix, too, of course – how could it not be? – but Pine’s Darren Barrenman is a more Lebowski-esque bearded aging-hippie figure than vintage Jack Nicholson. At the same time, Darren has a nominally clearer head than The Dude; rather than bowling, he dedicates a considerable amount of time serving as a nuisance to the city council of Los Angeles, where he presents various civic improvement projects at public meetings. He’s also making a documentary with the help of Jack (Danny DeVito) and Diane (Annette Bening), the couple who owns the small apartment complex where he tends a comically undersized pool.
When Darren gets a mysterious tip from a femme-fatale type (DeWanda Wise) that his councilman nemesis (Stephen Tobolowsky) may be part of a corrupt real-estate/water scheme (yes, like in Chinatown), he decides, with some encouragement, to step up and investigate the man further. Jack and Diane assist him as usual, and there are many digressive, nattering dialogue scenes that underline the trio’s general lack of suitability as private investigators.
As a mystery, Poolman is admittedly a bit of a dud – possibly intentionally so, which might understandably frustrate noir fans. Comedy fans might even find it patience-trying to spend so much time with characters who spend so much time running in circles. But as a personality-based riff on the whole L.A. noir thing, Pine does capture something with Poolman, starting with his own loopy sincerity. Darren is a goofball – he writes frequent letters to Erin Brockovich, his inspiration and possibly obsession – yet he’s not quite a doofus. The key to his character – or maybe the key to why I kind of loved his character – comes when he, in full frenzied sincerity, namechecks Who Framed Roger Rabbit (yet another classic noir half-spoof) as he laments the city’s public-transportation problems, advocating for a return to the trolley system. It’s apt and daft all at once, as the movie places itself in the lineage of Chinatown descendants while acknowledging its own cartooniness and Darren’s oddly optimistic way of living. It’s almost like a noir where Roger and some other toons are left to their own devices to solve a mystery, rather than relying on Eddie Valiant.
This kind of bumbling could just as easily become insufferable Lebowski cosplay. But despite some Toontown-friendly antics involving Pine, DeVito, and Bening, and a few dream-sequence moments that feel more like padding than the equivalent moments in a Coen movie, Pine’s lens remains just distorted enough for its world to remain recognizable. Like a lot of filmmakers, his debut overflows with love for his influences, and Poolman is vastly less self-serious than many of the performance-focused projects often favored by actors-turned-directors. Instead, Pine zeroes in on the spirit of his city, finding lots to love about Los Angeles that’s only tangentially related to the movies it produces. Darren himself isn’t a movie nut. He doesn’t think of himself as the star of his own cracked-mirror noir – though that’s exactly what he is – and instead chooses to focus on a greater good, no matter how discombobulated he gets about it.
Poolman is an admittedly minor curiosity that demands a certain go-with-the-flow patience. But it’s amusingly acted, vibrantly shot on 35mm to capture sunny yellows and pool-trim blues (the cinematographer is Wonder Woman’s Matthew Jensen), and all around way off from the worst indulgence of a typical festival season. (Frankly, worse Toronto movies have won major prizes.) Even when Pine rambles on, he’s making a convincing case that his love for Los Angeles isn’t conditional on being loved back by movie audiences. You get the feeling that, movie star or not, Pine might well have spent his life in L.A. anyway.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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