ENVY
[ 1/2] (One and one-half stars)
Failed black comedy. Running time: 99 minutes. Rated PG-13 (toilet humor). At the Kips Bay, the Union Square, the Chelsea West, others.
—-
‘ENVY” is one of those painful Hollywood enigmas. The mystery here is how a director like Barry Levinson (“Diner,” “Avalon,” “Tin Men”), working with stars like Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Christopher Walken, could make such an embarrassingly unfunny black comedy.
There are a few chuckles here and there, and there are odd wisps of cleverness in the script by Steve Adams, but for the most part, “Envy” is a film that doesn’t know where it’s going.
Instead, it lurches erratically and joylessly from heavy satire to hokey slapstick, and from sourness to saccharine sweetness.
Tim Dingman (Stiller) and Nick Vanderpark (Black) are next-door neighbors in the suburbs and work at the same sandpaper factory, and they’re both married with children and wish they had less drab lives.
Tim is an efficient manager; Nick is a dreamer constantly coming up with ideas for inventions that might make him a rich man.
One day, Nick conceives of a spray that can make pet turds vanish and finds there’s a scientist at the factory (Manny Kleinmuntz) who thinks he could pull it off.
Nick asks Tim to invest in the idea, but Tim refuses.
The “vapoorizer” spray somehow works (the scientist then mysteriously disappears from the film), and suddenly Nick is wealthy beyond his wildest dreams.
Nevertheless, he stays in the neighborhood, building a palace opposite Tim’s house and parking his Lamborghini out front.
Riches don’t change Nick, but Tim and his wife, Debby (Rachel Weisz, cruelly wasted), grow more and more tortured by jealousy, and it gets worse when they eat flan for the first time at a lavish dinner at Nick’s house, and again when Nick’s wife (Amy Poehler) decides to run for office.
Envy begins to wreck Tim’s life, prompting him to lose his job, get drunk, fall under the dangerous sway of a weird homeless guy, J-Man (Walken), and, finally, to kill Nick’s new horse.
There are times when “Envy” seems intended as serious satire designed to illustrate the corrosive effects of that deadly sin – but it’s quite another thing to imply it’s a disease that particularly affects taste-challenged middle-class Americans.
Much of the movie’s point seems to mock the tacky taste of such folk when suddenly blessed with millions of dollars – as if Hollywood types who have splattered the ritzier parts of L.A. with ersatz Southern mansions and fake English manors know any better.