The Big Year

Just who was this movie made for? I know the Audubon Society boasts a healthy membership, but is it really big enough to justify the salaries of Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson? Did the producers negotiate a package deal? All three are past their comedic prime, lately turning in performances with ever-diminishing laughs (The Pink Panther, Gulliver’s Travels, Drillbit Taylor respectively), but here they shed their shtick for inexplicable blandness. Some might argue that they’re playing decently formed characters for a change, but there’s no getting around that they’re not very interesting characters.

The Big Year is the kind of innocent, forgettably genial movie that your Sunday school teacher might have enjoyed. The subject matter is inoffensive, the leads are decent, likable folks, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a naughty word or controversial idea anywhere in sight. Of course, the movie also lacks wit, depth or energy.

Too easygoing to find its own comedic or dramatic potential, happy to amble along at an expectation-free pace, director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada, Marley and Me) has paired his A-list leads with a talented supporting cast — Angelica Huston, Dianne Weist, Rashida Jones, Tim Blake Nelson, JoBeth Williams, Joel McHale, and Kevin Pollak — and delivered a whole lot of meh.

The gist is this: Black is a divorced, living-with-his-parents computer programmer who obsesses about birds and hopes to raise enough funds to compete in the Big Year. Martin is the powerful CEO of an anonymous corporation (They do deals! In offices!) and fears that he’ll never get to live his dream of winning the Big Year. What is the Big Year? It’s an annual bird-watching contest where participants attempt to observe as many species in the United States as possible. The current record holder is Wilson, a wily competitor who will do anything to keep his title — even neglect his beautiful new wife (Rosamund Pike). The three men, each struggling to define his life, crisscross the country in pursuit of victory. Needless to say, with nary a big laugh to be found (and believe me, I looked), the movie is a tough sell. Which explains why its movie trailer is so profoundly unrevealing. Avoiding all references to birds or birding, 20th Century Fox’s marketing department has decided to zero in on a couple of Jack Black pratfalls and the name recognition of its stars to make bank. What they don’t tell you is that the film has spent more than a dozen years in development. Maybe it should have stayed there.

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