On seeing the Cannes premiere of Maren Ade’s Oscar-nominated German tragicomedy Toni Erdmann – starring Peter Simonischek as the ageing, jape-addicted dad who suffers a late-life crisis and sets out to embarrass his daughter at work – I wondered aloud who would play the lead in a Hollywood remake.
My shortlist was Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin and Ben Kingsley. (Since then, in conversation, I’ve also speculated about the possibility of luring Gene Hackman out of retirement.) Alexander Payne’s father-daughter comedy About Schmidt seemed an obvious comparison to me and probably to others, and now Variety has announced that Jack Nicholson is to come out of semi-retirement to play the lead in the remake; Kristen Wiig (who stars in Payne’s new film, Downsizing) is to play his long-suffering daughter, the role in which Sandra Hüller was so brilliant.
And who is to play the creepy young executive who Ines forces to masturbate on the cakes in front of her? My money is on Will Arnett. Kristen Wiig is a good choice for Ines, perhaps the only choice, although Kate McKinnon would have been interesting, or maybe even Hope Davis, Nicholson’s co-star from About Schmidt.
Is the Toni Erdmann remake a bad idea … or a really bad idea? Is there an awful possibility that the remake will not “get” that tonally ambiguous and elusive part of the film, and Nicholson will be muggingly over-the-top, in precisely that unfunny and misjudged way that Ade’s original movie was anatomising?
Obviously, there is an unhappy tradition of bad and wrong English-language remakes, the most recent being Secret in Their Eyes, a lame Hollywood version of Juan José Campanella’s Oscar-winning Argentinian noir thriller El Secreto De Sus Ojos, which managed to mislay almost all of the original’s tone, texture, thrills and heartbreak. And of course everyone knows about George Sluizer’s misfiring English-language remake of his own classic chiller The Vanishing. Michael Haneke created his own shot-for-shot replica-remake of his ordeal thriller Funny Games, the way Gus Van Sant did with Psycho, both cases laying the directors open to charges of pointlessness.
But perhaps complaining about remakes has become too much of a badge of fanboy purity. Steven Soderbergh was thought to be guilty of incredible hubris and sacrilege in remaking Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris with George Clooney and Natascha McElhone in the leads. And the result was – whisper it – not too bad at all: an intelligent, creative homage from a real film-maker. And Nicholson himself had taken the lead in a prominent and decent remake: Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning The Departed, a translation of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s crime thriller Infernal Affairs, shifting the action from Hong Kong to Boston. Nicholson played the gang boss Frank Costello – originally played by Eric Tsang.
Nicholson needed no excuse there to crank up the performance. What he will do with Toni Erdmann is anyone’s guess; he may play opposite Wiig with all the subtlety he had opposite Adam Sandler in Anger Management. But Alexander Payne was strict with Nicholson on About Schmidt, and got one of his very best performances out of him.
So what will the producers of the Americanised “Tony Erdmann” do? I predict they will:
1. Hire Barry Levinson as director, after Alexander Payne has turned them down.
2. Hire Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Adam McKay, Judd Apatow and Simon Rich to write and tinker with the English-language script. McKay is already credited as executive producer, as is Ade.
3. Cut at least half an hour from the running time, partly by losing the extended sequences in the Romanian oil fields, where Toni appears to want to intervene in the layoffs. This, sadly, will be key to losing the original flavour.
4. Create a crucial “backstory” scene for Nicholson/Wiig, a specific moment of emotional betrayal or trauma in their shared past, avoided and not discussed until it is revealed in a climactic confrontation.
5. Change the wonderful scene in which Ines hugs her dad who is dressed in the great furry monster costume. In the original, the head was not removed. In the remake, it will be removed to reveal Jack’s shaggy, tearful face.
6. Give Nicholson a big final speech in the monster costume.
7. Allow Kristen Wiig not to be fully nude in the party scene.
As for Nicholson himself, it is difficult to tell. He may be brilliant and I hope that he is. But his sheer star wattage is working against him: Peter Simonischek was an unknown quantity to most, and so his performance was a revelation.
A director has to be tough with Nicholson, and keep him within bounds. Wiig is a great performer, but she too will have to keep her natural comic instincts under control – although she certainly managed this for Sebastián Silva’s movie Nasty Baby.
Maybe it won’t be too bad.
- This article was amended on 8 February. The original stated that Ines’s colleague masturbates on the carpet in front of her. It is actually some cakes. This has been corrected.
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