Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
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Conan O'Brien can't stop? OK, let's go with it.
So, uh, can't stop what?
Being funny? We already knew that, given that the redheaded wonder rebounded in high-style following his skeevy oust from The Tonight Show in the fall of 2009, hitting the road with a traveling variety show that came to be called the "Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television" Tour. Filmmaker Rodman Flender was there the whole way, camera in hand, and the footage he captured has now been edited into a feature documentary about the tour called (yep) Conan O'Brien Can't Stop.
You've got to give Flender credit for his timing; he seems to have dropped out of the sky, camera in hand, right after O'Brien's NBC exodus, which is summarized in an amusing, albeit rather brief, animated opening segment. The images he gets in the wake of the NBC fiasco, following through to the end of the tour, are raw, to say the least. From the minute we meet him, Conan is already chomping at the bit, scoping out new network homes ("I'm not going to TBS!" he snits at one point) and fretting over how he can best reach the audience he's at risk of losing without the help of TV airtime. His tenacity is a central point for the movie, but this turns out to be merely the tip of the iceberg.
So what then, he can't stop performing?
Sure seems like it. Conan turns out to be something of a closet perfectionist, like the Michael Jackson of late-night television. When something goes right, his team is showered with glowing praise. When it goes wrong, Conan's body tenses, his eyes grow cold, and he starts firing off scathing barbs, rat-a-tat-tat, like gunfire, to voice his displeasure.
Sometimes (most times, really), it's all in the name of fun, hence the Eddie Murphy suit. Flender frames Conan as not only a funny guy, but a funny guy who understands the power of presentation and performance. Not only that, but he's incredibly good at creating bits out of thin air. In the film's funniest moment, Conan launches into a comedic mauling of 30 Rock's Jack McBrayer, who has made the mistake of showing his face backstage, and the entire room lights up as his zingers hit home. Suddenly, before we know it, a spontaneous performance -- and a good one, at that -- has grown out of what was supposed to be a quiet moment.
The impetus for this Ironman-level schedule is, we're led to believe, the result of some kind of people-pleasing compulsion Conan draws/suffers from, the notion of which haunts the movie but is never explored deeply enough to make our hero ever seem like anything other than a perky lunatic. "I don't know what it would be like to stop," O'Brien intones early on in the film, letting that final word hang in the air like an unpleasant aftertaste.
So, basically, he doesn't. Secret shows are added, bonus performances are put together on the spot, and more often than not Conan drags himself out for an extra meet-and-greet or autograph session despite his growing weariness. And make no mistake, he is weary, as he proclaims loudly, and often, to anyone with a pair of ears within his blast radius.
So maybe he can't stop complaining, then?
Big time, and herein lies the problem. Those who tuned into the final Tonight Shows were treated to a surprising portrait of grace under fire, capped off with a wonderful farewell monologue and a sweet little performance with The White Stripes. In those last few hours of television, O'Brien seemed like a straight-backed guy who refused, for all life was throwing at him, to wallow in self-pity.
From the minute we meet him in Can't Stop, however, he's nowhere close to that guy. It's tough not to sympathize with someone who's been so thoroughly screwed over as O'Brien was, but man, does he whine. Admittedly, O'Brien shows a certain dignity in his disgrace while he first puts the tour together; Flender shoots him as the underdog scraping by on life's little victories, and the movie rides high on the wins he scrapes together. The lead-up to Conan's first show in the middle of nowhere, and the progression from trepidation to elation that goes with it, is perfectly handled.
Then the floodgates open as the shows start piling on, and the movie runs in circles: every other scene becomes a soliloquy about how burned out Conan is getting and how he doesn't want to do any more meet-and-greets and doesn't anybody understand what he's going through here? It's here that the movie becomes kind of a distant, if vaguely compelling, character study of a man at the mercy of his own compulsions. You want Conan to be happy, but more than anything you want someone to slap him across the face and tell him to do his job.
It's unclear, at times, whether this hectic schedule is at the insistence of Conan's handlers or the man himself, but focusing less on Conan's need to push himself to such a brink than on his reaction is a disservice to both the man and his story. Conan O'Brien Can't Stop is more observation than investigation; we get the surface account of Conan's odyssey but nothing on his inner journey, as it were. After a while, you get the sense that Flender isn't trying to so much tell O'Brien's story as validate his suffering, and the movie, while amusing, fails to connect.
So, back to the big question: why can't Conan O'Brien stop? That's the problem. Six months following him, and Flender can't give us an answer. Conan makes an interesting character subject, but Flender does nothing with what he's given except keep filming. All we're left with is a feel-good story that's full of questions, which is too bad. If Flender had just pushed Conan to give a deeper answer, there's a good chance the guy wouldn't stop talking, either
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