Feature films and documentaries can sometimes struggle to fasten down viewers’ attention if the central character isn’t sympathetic but maybe we’re a tad more forgiving of anti-heroes in nonfiction as we accept warts and all in real life. But this film about actor and comic Chevy Chase faces an uphill battle given that not only does it report on what an “asshole” – to quote the epithet most often applied to him – he has been in the past, we also witness some assholery first-hand. In the opening minutes, we see him telling the film’s director Marina Zenovich that he’s smarter than her, while he also interrupts her, rolls his eyes at her questions and generally acts the dork.
This is partly the infamous “teasing” Chase has always copped to, of a piece with his comically arrogant comic style which the film’s title encapsulates. (It used to be his catchphrase when he anchored the Weekend Update segment on US sketch show Saturday Night Live.) That self-aggrandisement went hand in hand with the denigration of everyone around him, which ended up turning Chase into the most obnoxious kind of coked-up insult-comic by the 1990s.
This was long after his heyday as a star in the original cast of SNL and then a Hollywood star in his own right in films such as Caddyshack, Fletch and the National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise. The times changed around him and not to his benefit. We see footage here of him calling Richard Pryor the N-word back in a 70s-era SNL sketch. Later, when he was said to have started using racist language on the set of the TV show Community, cast members of colour were not forgiving.
And yet, this film gets across Chase’s good side too in a way that’s actually convincing. It helps that we learn about his miserable childhood, full of abuse from his mother, and while he was clearly always a difficult personality, the affection and love for him from his own children and current wife, Jayni, bolsters the assertion that he can’t be all bad. Best of all, Zenovich and her editor, splicing and dicing 50 years of archive material, get across Chase’s abundant talent at its best, particularly his masterly command of the pratfall, and his immaculate comic timing.