I Love You, Daddy. Starring Louis C.K. and Chloë Grace Moretz. Directed by Louis C.K. Running time: 123 minutes. MPAA rating: R.
Watching the edgy, abandoned-by-its-studio comedy I Love You, Daddy, which may be writer/director Louis C.K.’s last effort for a long while at least, is a saddening experience for one who has admired C.K.’s previous work in stand-up and on TV. In what has to be the most awkward case of timing since Husbands and Wives premiered after the Woody Allen scandal, the movie’s former distributor, The Orchard, mailed out its for-your-consideration screener discs, which arrived days after the schlubby auteur’s acts of sexual misconduct were confirmed and attached to real names, and after C.K. himself acknowledged that the women’s “stories were true.” So now hundreds of critics are sitting with this damn thing, wondering whether to watch it in the first place, and wondering what the hell to do with it once they have watched it.
What I can do with it, having watched it, is to say that I Love You, Daddy requires a great deal of unpacking if one is unwilling to ignore the real life surrounding it. I can say that the movie is clearly the work of a gifted weasel — a man who writes scenes and dialogue that actors can latch onto and make sing, and also a man who has, on several occasions that we know of, pleasured himself in front of women without their stated consent. The film is about perversion and neurosis, as so much of Louis C.K.’s work is. It is also unavoidably funny, due largely to the terrific cast C.K. has assembled. It would be a bummer if the hilarious apoplexy of, say, Edie Falco as a harried TV producer toiling against an impossible schedule, or the joie de sleaze of Charlie Day as a loutish TV comedy star, were lost in oblivion. Perhaps at some point in the future their contributions, and those of others in the cast, can be viewed and enjoyed.
C.K. plays Glen Topher, a successful television creator working on his second show, which he isn’t crazy about, but a prime-time slot was open and he grabbed it. Glen is also dealing with his rudderless 17-year-old daughter China (Chloë Grace Moretz), who finds herself drifting into the orbit of Glen’s filmmaking idol Leslie Goodwin (John Malkovich), who seems to be conceived as a cosmopolitan libertine in the mold of, oh, Woody Allen (whose influence on C.K.’s show Louie and on this film is obvious). Glen is appalled that the 68-year-old genius Leslie has taken an interest in his daughter. He has endless anguished talks about it with various women in his life, most of whom tell him he’s a schmuck, a bad father, a bad man. Even the movie star (Rose Byrne) who admires Glen’s work and may star in his new show soon finds herself regarding him with distaste and frustration.
The Louie persona has always attracted women, despite himself, and then repelled them, because of himself. Louis C.K. is more savage to himself (or to his character, but at this point it’s a distinction without much of a difference) than to anyone else in the movie, but that’s nothing new. What is new, and weird, is that I Love You, Daddy — in form an homage to Woody’s notorious Manhattan — both lionizes Allen’s work and deplores his pervy attention to women much younger. I wish I could say the movie worked as Louis’ apologia for his own skeeviness or as an artistic reckoning with it, but a late scene in which seeming justification for grossness — “Everyone’s a pervert” — is put in the mouth of China’s teenage African-American BFF (Ebonee Noel) is dodgy at best. Louis doesn’t dare voice this himself, so he has what he considers a beyond-criticism source — black and female — do it for him. It’s cowardly. It sucks.
It’s impossible to watch I Love You, Daddy except through the stained scrim of its creator’s actions — same as with Husbands and Wives, really, except that movie seemed to have more under the hood. Allen’s film also weighed in at just an hour and forty-eight minutes (generally he has never let his movies run much longer than that, with a couple of exceptions); C.K.’s goes on, often in bland, static two-shots (nicely photographed in b&w though they are), for two hours and three minutes. The movie has fleetingly interesting things to say about what men think female sexuality should be and about women’s “Oh, really?” response to that.
What if the movie had come from a sexually and personally unimpeachable artist? Then, oddly, it wouldn’t seem to have much point. I Love You, Daddy seems to want to be an excoriation of disgusting maleness from a man who knows the disgustingness all too well, who has lived in it and with it, but Glen isn’t disgusting, just a lame, opportunistic creator and an insufficiently assertive parent. The finger of scorn ultimately points not to Glen or even to Leslie (who seems imperiously sexless) but to the flighty China, despite Moretz’s compassionate performance. The source of male agita is a teenage girl who has no inner life, has nothing much except a body to be lusted after, protected, or barely clothed. Which makes this an art-house version of the legendarily creepy ‘80s “comedies” She’s Out of Control or Blame It on Rio, and did we really need one? Even without Louis C.K.’s real-life sliminess, this movie wouldn’t sit well on the stomach.