By Tricia Olszewski
Cheese: The new Brussels sprouts
At one point in I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, a struggling Chicago actor named James is giving a career-day talk at an elementary school when he starts rambling. "Get this," he tells the stone-faced kids about his latest job. "It was supposed to be a funny show, but I made people cry. Isn't that silly?"
Curb Your Enthusiam's Jeff Garlin plays James – and also wrote and directed – and although he won't make you cry here, he'll probably make you yawn. Garlin's pet project with the unwieldy title feels terribly familiar, with its chatter about minutiae and throwback, accordion-heavy soundtrack making it seem like a Curb episode directed by Woody Allen. But instead of neuroses that are black-tinged and deep-seated, most of Cheese's navel-gazing is genial to the point of being childlike. "Where'd the term 'dealership' come from?" James asks a receptionist when the reality show he hosts plays a joke on a mechanic. "What about tent sales? What is it about tents that make people want to buy cars?" With each scene change, you can picture Garlin cut-and-pasting riffs he's written over the years to form some semblance of a story. Occasionally they're amusing; mostly, though, it's like hanging out with someone who tediously must express every thought that comes to mind. Or a toddler who just learned how to ask questions.
Then again, perhaps that's fitting considering that the 39-year-old James still lives with mother. The two other things that are important to know about James is that he's fat and looking for love. (If watching the plus-size actor in every scene isn't enough to remind you about his weight, someone mentions it at what feels like five-minute intervals.) He seems to find love but not a solution to his dieting problems when he meets Beth (Sarah Silverman), a "hot girl" who gives James her practice sundae when she's watching her sister's ice-cream shop – and soon, uh, asks him to go underwear-shopping with her. (He's as incredulous as we are.)
Silverman is initially a bright spot in this exceedingly loose film, but her character is impossible to like. The same can be said of the majority of the well-connected Garlin's guest stars: Second City alumni such as Bonnie Hunt, Amy Sedaris, and Dan Castellanata show up, though their main direction was apparently to act weird so Garlin can scrunch his eyebrows together at them.
James does little but meander from rejection to rejection throughout the film. He's dumped personally, he's dumped professionally. None of these turns are given much explanation, despite the fact that, clocking in at a meager 80 minutes, the script had plenty of room for some. Every time someone tells James what a loser he is, though, he never raises more than an affable fuss over it, which makes the character's problems feel all the more contrived. Hearing about a remake of Marty for the Tiger Beat generation, in fact, seems to upset James more than the idea that his life is tanking. This sub-sub-plot at least leads to Cheese's funniest scene – which involves a secondslong upstaging by teen pop star Aaron Carter. Now that's silly.