I was very excited to watch The Upside. For years, I had watched American films that were remakes of overseas dramas and comedies, but this was the first time I had seen the overseas comedy, and recognized the American remake immediately. The Upside loses some of the magic of The Intouchables translation from French to English, but thanks to Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston, The Upside succeeds far more than it fails.
After an amusing (but not amazing) intro, The Upside places us in the life of paraplegic Phillip Lacasse (Bryan Cranston). After firing his last Life Assistant, his business confidant Yvonne (Nicole Kidman) sets up a series of interviews to find a new caretaker. Lacasse becomes impressed by Dell (Kevin Hart), an ex-con who only really wants to prove he was at the interview so he won’t go back to jail. Phillip hires Dell instead, who slowly learns his way into the position, giving Philip that spark for living he had been lacking since his wife passed away. Dell also has personal demons, but living ones: he’s completely neglected his ex Latrice (Aja Naomi King) and his son Anthony (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) to the point where his presence is met with immediate coldness.
Much like the French Original, The Upside succeeds because of its 2 leads: Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston. Cranston isn’t as much of a surprise: he’s been great in a lot of movies for a while now. In The Upside he’s really only using his face to do his acting, and he busts out all the great tics in his arsenal to give us a shell of a man who slowly comes back to life. But I knew Cranston was going to be fine. I’m not officially done underestimating Kevin Hart carrying a semi-dramatic movie. Hart’s manic energy is inside Dell somewhere, usually coming out when he gets frustrated or exasperated. However, Hart downplays that energy most of the time, channeling it into a guy who has been shirking his responsibilities too long, and wants to be a better person. There’s a real performance from Hart here, making Dell feel like a real character, not just some movie trope. The key though is Cranston and Hart together. As the saying goes, sometimes you’ve just got to put funny people in the room and turn the camera on. The animated Hart and the deadpanned Cranston fit really well together, finding an easy chemistry that makes them great scene partners when going for laughs, and even when things get a little more serious.
Thank goodness for the actors’ chemistry, because movie translations, especially comedic ones, are REALLY hard to pull off. You have to factor in the United States’s comedy tastes and political climate into certain scenes. For example, the opening scene of the French film is funny throughout, but contains a cop confrontation with a man of color. In the US, no matter how much the filmmakers try to keep that scene light, it’s hard not to clutch the arm of the person you’re sitting next to, wondering if something terrible is going to happen. As such, the shot for shot remake of the opening doesn’t quite set the tone as well as the French film. Conversely, a scene with Kevin Hart dancing in front of white people to get them to party just reeks of old timey cruel filmmaking in the US, so that scene was rightfully reshot. In general, I learned the Frenchness of The Intouchables is what makes it great, because the obviously American touches to The Upside don’t quite fit into the story. Nicole Kidman’s Yvonne is thrust into a rom com when the movie is clearly a buddy comedy, because the movie has to justify casting her and giving everyone in a comedy what they want: a significant other! There’s also an American thing of forcing the characters apart so they can get back together later, instead of letting it happen organically like in the French film. These little touches or subplots basically keep us from Cranston and Hart, the reason to see the movie in the first place.
France 1. America 0. Though the score is closer than you think, because of Bryan Cranston and Kevin Hart. This gives me hope for Kevin Hart’s lasting power as a force in Hollywood. It would make me laugh to see him get an Oscar nomination for this (not gonna happen, sadly), and watch him decline to attend the award show. THAT would be funny.