[Gordon-Levitt plays an anxious drifter in Apple’s angsty,
slow-burning new dramedy, which rewards its viewers’ patience]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

MR CORMAN REVIEW – JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT TACKLES MILLENNIAL MALAISE
 
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Rebecca Nicholson
August 6, 2021
The Guardian
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_ Gordon-Levitt plays an anxious drifter in Apple’s angsty,
slow-burning new dramedy, which rewards its viewers’ patience _

Promising ... Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Mr Corman., Photograph: Matt
Klitscher/Apple TV

 

Mr Corman (Apple TV+) is one of those comedies that is not really a
comedy, unless you find unceasing malaise to be of the utmost
hilarity. It is the definition of a slow-burn; the first two episodes
are available now, with the rest following weekly, but this early
outing offers only hints of what is to come. Based on the opening
episodes, Mr Corman barely stands out from the other not-so-funny
comedies with an indie film sensibility. But stick with it, and it
unfurls into something far more curious and absorbing.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt created the show and stars as the titular Mr Josh
Corman, a schoolteacher experiencing a deep-rooted sense of dismay at
his lot in life. (Gordon-Levitt also wrote and directed the first
episode, which gives him an impressive four credits at the end.) Josh
is wondering where the time has gone, and trying to persuade himself
that he is happy as a teacher, but he is unable to find a spark in
anything he does. He mopes around, and worries, and hammers at his
synth from his former life in a band. Inside his head seems like a
troublesome place to be.

If this sounds familiar, well, it isn’t uncommon to have a drifting,
thirtysomething protagonist who feels as if he should have done more,
or done it differently. Josh is neurotic and prone to anxiety. To lift
his mood, his flatmate Victor (Arturo Castro, so good that later in
the series, he gets his own episode, cleverly repositioning the title
as “Mr Morales”) suggests that sex might work. So Josh goes to a
bar with an old friend, who is “staying relentless” in the pursuit
of his creative dreams, if you can call them that. “I got verified a
couple of months ago so I must be doing something right,” he says,
at which point you start to understand Josh’s despair.

At the bar, he meets a woman and goes back to her place. What follows
starts out as a classically awful attempt at a one-night stand, which
then descends into a surreal exchange of cutting insults, delivered
with theatrical flourish. He can’t maintain an erection. She is
upset, then kind, then defensive again, and they circle each other as
if characters in a play, first attacking the state of each other’s
breath, then the state of their lives and their ambitions. Then, Josh
flies out of a window, right into an animated collage of the moon,
which turns into an egg being fertilised, which cuts to an egg frying
in a pan.

In the second episode, Josh has a prolonged panic attack, which he
attempts to dull by being around other people. His phone, a stand-in
for human contact, takes him from apocalyptic news to celebrity fluff,
to Bumble, to Instagram, where eventually, inevitably, he lands on
pictures of his ex Megan (Juno Temple). The sound design here, as
elsewhere, is sharp, menacing and constant, ramping up the tension
nicely. When Josh has a minor car crash, there is no sound of metal
but an ambient noise in his head, coupled with disorientating solar
flares from the daylight around him. The frequent arty interludes make
it clear that Mr Corman wants to be different to all the other indie
comedies out there. But I must confess that during one tense phonecall
scene, I accidentally pressed pause, and thought the absolute
stillness was a clever way of conveying Josh’s inability to deal
with his emotions. It turned out to be just a slip of the spacebar.

These first two episodes have a meandering aimlessness, which make
them a hard sell. After all, film-makers have discovered, again and
again, that it is tremendously difficult and rare to make gripping
drama out of existential angst. Whether audiences will have the energy
to keep going with it depends on whether its promising moments cut
through the steady drip of sadness. If they do, they will find much to
reward them. By the end of the series, the pandemic has crept in, and
rather than ignore it, Gordon-Levitt makes it a focus; Zoom dates lend
themselves well to a story that feeds on awkwardness.

Mr Corman, then, is a show that resists immediacy, but rewards
patience. These opening episodes don’t do it justice. But stick with
it, and you will find a promising, prickly newcomer.

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