Chris Rock knows best in Top Five
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Top Five is Chris Rock’s Woody Allen movie. Its romantic tensions evoke those of Annie Hall, and its disgust with celebrity culture, with fame, recalls Stardust Memories. (Rock plays Andre Allen, recovering user, recovering comic and soon-to-be-recovering badly reviewed serious actor.) Top Five is also writer-director-star Rock’s Richard Linklater movie — the Linklater of Before Sunrise and its two sequels, Linklater the walking-and-talking enthusiast and improvisational collaborator. (Andre is spending the day with Chelsea Brown, a reporter of unlikely sensibilities rendered whole by Rosario Dawson’s great performance.) And Top Five is Rock’s distillation of his own stand-up, Louis C.K.’s FX show, Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, and a couple of semesters’ worth of NYU film school (if Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee were among the lecturers).
You get the feeling that Rock has thrown every good idea and every creative impulse at his disposal into Top Five. You get the feeling because he has pretty much said as much, in a recent tidal wave of press (with nearly every interview its own memorable demonstration of wit and political savvy). If this thing flops, he’s been telling people, his fourth directing job may be a long way off. Yet there is nothing desperate about Top Five, which is instead utterly confident without overstating its swagger. It’s as original as mainstream American comedies get anymore — and as outside the mainstream as the best of our indie movies.
It’s also — let’s skip the synopsis and the analysis of Hollywood and race and race and everywhere else — flat-out funny. Top Five came out last Friday, stuck between Exodus and the last Hobbitorama, and it’s about to go up against the season’s biopics and awards bait. Rock and his movie deserve a big chunk of that attention. I want to see his next movie, the sooner the better.
