His was the kind of mug that sent women running to the other side of the street yet that voice, baritone and serene, like a minor chord sustained on a contrabass tuba, was something else entirely. His unmistakable visage–with that broad forehead, and his hollow, sunken-in eye, and that trace of a mouth, and those intimidating eyebrows between which he could probably bend rebar–wasn’t exactly handsome or friendly-looking (it’s that fist-like face that earned him the role of Frankenstein’s monster), so children were terrified of him. As the narrator becomes more self-aware and matures, Philip continues down his lonely path, unaware of the voice calling out to him.īoris Karloff is reputably one of the nicest guys to ever grace Hollywood.
Without the narrator’s lacerating dry humor, “Listen Up, Philip” may not be as capital-G Great as it is, since its characters are such assholes, and so much of the fun (and enlightenment) comes from the lingering voice’s erudition. The misanthropic scribe comes under the tutelage of a Philip Roth-like writer played by Jonathan Pryce (his finest role in years), and together they ornately chastise the world, one glass of scotch at a time. The titular Philip, played by Jason Schwartzman, is a talented young writer who lacks social graces and charm and displays an overall sense of resentment for humanity. The acerbic wit of the disembodied voice tells us things we wouldn’t otherwise know, things we already know, and things we know not to be true, depending on the situation.
“Listen Up, Philip,” the hysterical and deeply sad new film from writer-director Alex Ross Perry, makes use of an omnipresent, all-knowing narrator to elucidate the goings-on occurring around Perry’s self-concerned characters.
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