*** THE REF
In any comedy the funniest moment for us, the audience, is the most miserable for the characters. And so it is in Ted Demme’s brilliantly breezy The Ref, about an akward, pathetic, tragic, overwrought, embarrassing, potentially violent, and ultimately hilarious Christmas Eve dinner at the home of Caroline and Lloyd Chasseur, a genuinely wretched married couple.
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No wonder everybody in the family, from the troubled son Jesse to Lloyd’s suffocating mother Rose to Lloyd’s brother’s brood, dreads coming to another Christmas Eve dinner at the Chasseurs’ (mispronounced “Chaser” or “Chasser” and swiftly corrected by Lloyd: “Sha-soor! It’s 18th-century French Huguenot!”).
For anyone who doubts that character counts as much as writing in comedy, The Ref is a lesson. The screenplay (evidently a reworking by Richard LaGravenese–he wrote The Fisher King–of an idea by Marie Weiss) doubles as a vacuum cleaner. Without trying very hard, we can spot bits and pieces of Edward Albee, Woody Allen, and other bitter hubby-wifey comedies like The War of the Roses. The film’s opening, in which the camera wanders around a small-town Connectict Christmas scene before craning up to eavesdrop on the couple in the office of their shrink, is only one of several references to It’s a Wonderful Life (I wish everyone would give that movie a rest). In short, The Ref is an extremely familiar package tied up with a bow from “The Ransom of Red Chief” that succeeds on the strength of its acting. LaGravenese’s dialogue isn’t particularly witty on its own, but in the mouths of Davis, Spacey, and Leary it catches fire.
