Review: I’m Still Here

Casey Affleck documents his brother-in-law Joaquin Phoenix’s rejection of the movie business to become a white rapper. With a ‘homeless guy’ beard. Lots of incoherent ranting, incoherent whining, and incoherent rapping ensues.

I first saw this 2010 Casey Affleck mockumentary long after the director’s interview where he finally confessed that yes, this was all just a hoax. Personally, and I’m not bragging but I picked it long beforehand. I kinda thought most people did, actually. The infamous Dave Letterman interview, to be specific is where I picked up on it. I’d seen Joaquin acting bizarrely on chat shows before, but this is the interview everyone remembers. Part of that is because of Letterman’s hilarious closing line to his rather uncooperative guest (the only time Dave has ever made me laugh outside of his brilliant response to Jay Leno’s ‘Don’t Blame Conan’ quote), but all through the interview, whenever Letterman (who, depending on who you read, was either in on the joke or not) would crack wise, you could clearly see Phoenix struggling to refrain from smiling. But it doesn’t really bother me that this supposed look at Phoenix’s rejection of acting for hip-hop was faked. What bothers me is that this film is a piece of shit. It was on first viewing, and it’s no better in 2019. Watching the film it is completely and embarrassingly obvious that the whole thing was fake (though Phoenix does appear to be genuinely troubled at various points in his real-life, that I won’t deny). That’s the ultimate irony, really. The ruse would’ve been best served without the film’s release, yet the ruse was for the benefit of the film.

It’s just so poorly done. The film has complete end credits for starters, with people credited as playing characters who don’t share their real names. Oopsy. That’s actually Affleck’s dad in one scene pretending to be Phoenix’s dad, whilst Affleck and Phoenix are even credited as co-writers of this supposedly un-scripted reality. There’s no way Affleck (his frigging brother-in-law) or anyone else would actually allow Phoenix to snort cocaine and be shown hiring hookers on camera if it was real. No fucking way. There is lots of pot being smoked on screen, though. None of the people in the film behave like anything other than characters in a movie. Sure, to use a wrestling term it could be a ‘worked shoot’, but there’s a whole lot more ‘work’ (fake elements) to it than ‘shoot’ (reality). There’s way too many shots of Joaquin’s celebrity ‘friends’ to start with. Oh, Danny Glover, Bruce Willis, and Ben Stiller (who parodied his friend Joaquin’s persona and look at the Oscars for cryin’ out loud!) just happened to bump into Joaquin at the exact time there happens to be a documentary being made about this momentous change in his life and career? I call bullshit on all y’all. Oh, yeah, I’m sure they’re all close personal friends...right. Edward James Olmos’ cosmic hippie bullshit advice to Joaquin, meanwhile, plays like a parody of his cosmic hippie bullshit spoken word thing at the Superbowl a few years back. Either that, or Edward James Olmos genuinely doesn’t realise just how freakin’ tripped-out he sounds. P. Diddy, for his part, appears to be genuinely playing the role of P. Diddy rather than actually being him. There’s just something ‘off’ about him, like he knows this is all a joke and he’s desperately trying to play the role of a guy not in on that joke, even though he quite clearly is. If he weren’t, he’d be much more scathing about Joaquin’s pathetic ‘attempts’ at rapping, something P. Diddy would hold too near and dear to his heart to let some douchebag actor half-heartedly pretend to try his hand at (especially when said douchebag actor would seem to be better suited to country or R&R, he played and vocally mimicked Johnny Cash after all!). But because he’s in on the joke, he holds back from busting a cap in Joaquin’s arse. Fine, except Diddy, like everyone else in the film, isn’t remotely funny. No one, including Affleck, seems to have a clue how to make a mockumentary with actual humour.

Also, there’s something rather foul around the edges of all this. Even if Joaquin weren’t remotely troubled in real-life (and like I said, I think he probably is a bit troubled), his pretending to be a drug-abusing, irritatingly narcissistic, seemingly manic-depressive loser disillusioned with Hollywood...well, let’s just say it left a bad taste in my mouth on account of a certain deceased relative of his. There’s seemingly not a moment in the film where Phoenix isn’t in some way chemically impaired (or pretending to be, which may be worse). For the most part though, I was just bored shitless here. It’s a stupid and pointless film that didn’t even succeed in what it was apparently trying to do: Hoodwink main stream media into gleefully exploiting the downfall of a star and prove to people that ‘reality TV’ is scripted. Yes, some people bought it, but a whole lotta people didn’t, including me. It was as believable as John Malkovich leaving Hollywood to become a puppeteer. And when you’re already aware of the ruse (and remember, the director himself is the one who spilled the beans for God knows what reason at that point), it just becomes not just a failure, but an agonisingly boring waste of time (it was a box-office dud, too). I find absolutely no entertainment value in watching a genuinely talented actor with possible personal issues pretend to be even more fucked up than he is, spending 100 odd minutes mumbling, rambling, doing drugs (or simulating it), swearing non-stop (and unartfully) and generally just wasting my damn time with his clearly obvious ‘performance’. Besides, who in the hell doesn’t know that most ‘reality TV’ shows are scripted or at least carefully edited? No one’s that stupid, surely even in 2010 people surely knew.

Even if Affleck’s film were a more convincing ruse, it would still be a piece of shit, because it’s just the most off-putting and depressing experience of the year. Why did Phoenix and Affleck need to create such an idiotic, uninteresting, objectionable, sad, depressing, and off-putting ‘character’ in order to make their point anyway? You might get something out of this, I was bored out of my mind and felt like showering for a week afterwards. Why I bothered revisiting it, is something for me and my shrink to evaluate.

Rating: D