In “She’s Funny That Way,” Peter Bogdanovich returns to feature films for the first time since 2001’s “The Cat’s Meow.” “She’s Funny” is a loving ode to screwball comedies from the Golden Age of Hollywood that never approaches the films it pays homage to.
The cast is star-studded — Jennifer Aniston! Owen Wilson! Will Forte! Even Cybill Shepherd! — but none of these actors feels particularly comfortable handling the rat-a-tat dialogue that characterizes the best screwball. The script is never as funny as the film thinks it is, either. Still, “She’s Funny That Way” goes down smooth, even if it makes you wish you were watching “His Girl Friday” or “Bringing Up Baby” instead.
The appropriately complicated story is told through an unnecessary framing device. Actress Isabella Patterson (Imogen Poots, with a Bugs Bunny New Yawk accent) tells the story of her rise to fame to a cynical journalist (Illeana Douglas). Patterson, aka Glow, starts her tale as a call girl who happens to get hired by theater director Arnold Albertson (Owen Wilson), who gets just as excited about saving sex workers — giving them $30,000 if they promise to quit their night jobs and follow their dreams — as he does about eventually sleeping with them.
Unfortunately for Arnold, this all comes back to haunt him. Isabella’s dream is to be an actress, and she happens to perfectly fit the part of a call girl in Arnold’s next work, which just so happens to star his wife, Delta Simmons (Kathryn Hahn) and her action-star ex-lover (Rhys Ifans), who caught Arnold and Isabella post-tryst.
