8.5 out of 10
Cast:
Peter Simonischek as Winfried Conradi / Toni Erdmann
Sandra Hüller as Ines Conradi
Lucy Russell as Steph
Michael Wittenborn as Henneberg
Thomas Loibl as Gerald
Trystan Pütter as Tim
Hadewych Minis as Tatjana
Ingrid Bisu as Anca
Vlad Ivanov as Illiescu
Victoria Cocias as Flavia
Directed by Maren Ade
Toni Erdmann Review:
The difficulty of review is that it must sum up quickly works which, at their best, have a multitude of layers between plot, character and theme. Anything submitted to such a reduction runs the risk of being transformed into some derivative which – on the surface – appears similar while losing its essence. Take for instance Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann; just describing its plot, it doesn’t seem too different from your bog standard studio comedy of errors.
Young executive on the make Ines (Hüller) is in the middle of the most stressful deal of her career – consulting for a Romanian oil company – and not at all prepared for her prank-loving father (Simonischek) to drop into her life. As he and his alter-ego (the titular Erdmann) gradually become the focus of her friends and colleagues, even as he desperately tries to rekindle his relationship with Ines.
That is simultaneously an accurate representation of Erdmann’s plot and a complete misreading of what it is. More than one studio comedy has used a similar setup to build to conventional, even hilarious punch lines surrounding mistaken identity or public embarrassment mixed with some level of slapstick. None of them could summon the weirdness or skill required to fill an apartment with naked people trying to figure out how to react to a silent figure wandering around dressed like a giant woolen pillar.
And that’s merely the pay-off of a long, strange trip through disaffection and connection with a discretely human touch. In writer-director Maren Ade’s hands, the bones for a standard bit of humiliation-based comedy becomes instead the launching pad for both a deep character examination and more universal statements about human nature.
It would be easy to give much of the credit for Erdmann’s success to ‘Edrmann’ himself. With his hangdog stare, ridiculous wig and prank teeth, Simonischek frequently steals the focus of any scene he is on to himself. But because he is always ‘in character’ even within the film itself, it is difficult to ever really know what he’s feeling. For all that he worries about Ines’ dislocation from the world around her, Winifred himself rarely lets his guard down to showcase his true angst.
It’s really Hüller herself who makes Erdmann go, switching effortlessly between very different types of contempt for her father (and his perceived lack of seriousness) and her colleagues (and their vapidness) and her terrifying desire to connect with them and share what they have. On paper Ines could be insufferable, but in Hüller’s hands she is almost tragic, a lost soul who deserves to be saved but isn’t sure if she wants to be.
The real hero, however, is Ade herself who from conception to staging to performance manages a believable and realistic tone no matter how strange the set-up, keeping the film both hilarious and genuine. It’s an excruciatingly difficult tightrope to walk, one which has doomed more than a few skillful comedy directions, but Ade manages it with apparent ease.
She also takes the time to build a slow but scathing indictment of modern corporate culture, the root of which is killing Ines. Between the dismissal of her male colleagues and the vapidness of her female friends traveling in the same circles Ines’ human relationships have devolved to a collection of power games which whipsaw between the pitiful and the depraved. Her days are spent spewing corporate banalities and her nights are spent washing that fact away with drink, drugs and sex. As with its stranger comedic elements, Ade keeps from ever being too strident or declaiming about her themes, instead letting them speak for themselves.
There are some rough patches, particularly early on helped in large part by Ade’s willingness to let scenarios develop rather than dive right into them. Erdmann is a film which rewards patience but it’s also overlong and tends to the episodic with a little in the way of a throughline for Winifred and Ines’ adventures beyond their presence. As criticisms go, those are fairly small ones; the reality of films like Toni Erdmann is that they defy easy or quick review – they’re too complicated and too strange and any brief critique will miss much of what makes them work. Hilarious, weird, insightful and charming, Toni Erdmann is the type of character comedy which comes along infrequently and like its shaggy dog of a father figure must be cherished in the time it is here.
