Best Sellers: Aubrey Plaza and Michael Caine give good bicker in an otherwise soft book-tour road comedy

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-minus

Overwhelmed-young-person-babysitting-cantakerous-old-celebrity is a comedy trope that occasionally delivers a classic. My Favourite Year comes to mind.

Best Sellers, in which Aubrey Plaza is an in-over-her-head publisher trying to bring an objectionable, reclusive author (Michael Caine) to market, is not a classic. Its script is undercooked and veers in random directions from its simple premise. But it has a heart, and two likeable leads who work well together.

Struggling book publisher Aubrey Plaza and cantankerous literary lion (Michael Caine) in Best Sellers.

Director Lina Roessler’s movie also puts the lie to the idea that famous – especially Internet-famous – equals rich. Caine’s character Harris Shaw, a prodigious smoker and drinker of Johnny Walker Black (the Scotch brand is mentioned so often, you could make a drinking game out of it) is brought back from obscurity through YouTube notoriety. But millions of views won’t pay his overdue mortgage.

The movie introduces us to Lucy Stanbridge (Plaza), the Millennial heir to a famed-but-floundering New York publishing house, now reduced to living off the dwindling revenues of Young Adult novelists. Facing bankruptcy, and the predatory buy-out offers from a weasel publishing exec (Scott Speedman), Lucy decides her company needs a “name” author to prop it back up.

Unfortunately, such names are either “dead or unaffordable,” her faithful assistant Rachel (Ellen Wong) informs her. But a little digging reveals that Shaw – who’d been signed to a publishing deal by Lucy’s father 40 years earlier – still owed them a book. Shaw had one best-seller to his name, Atomic Autumn, and then spent the ensuing years mainly drinking and occasionally pecking away at his old manual typewriter.

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The phone-less hermit is decidedly unwelcoming when the two women show up at his door, dismissing his old editor’s daughter with the nickname “Silver Spoon,” and getting them to leave at shotgun-point. 

Circumstances, however, bring the old sot and “Silver Spoon” together, with a script called The Future is X-Rated (which Shaw just happened to have lying around).

Just to keep the bickering going, Lucy invokes a clause in the contract whereby the author must agree to a book tour.

And we’re off!

Determined to sabotage his own tour, Shaw shows up drunk at every stop, his version of reading from his book consists of reciting the word “Bullshite!” over and over, and at different points he publicly urinates and book-burns. With all the smartphones pointed at him, he soon goes viral, igniting heavy sales of “Bullshite!” t-shirts. Unfortunately, notoriety doesn’t translate into book sales.

Having turned its male protagonist into a social media monster, Best Sellers divides its time between Lucy’s plan to redirect Shaw’s infamy in a relevant way to pump up the book, and unpacking the emotional baggage both she and Shaw carry around. His late wife… her dad… who loved who… who really edited who back in the day. There is drinking, puking, dire medical diagnoses, etc.

For all the trenchant turns, Best Sellers remains soft and good-hearted. But considering Plaza’s dead-pan comedy chops and Caine’s ability to do pretty much anything, it is a much less antic and funny movie than it could have been (notwithstanding the peeing, drinking, puking, etc). Caine’s portrayal of a rampant id morphs into sadness and sentimentality, which is a lot less fun.

Best Sellers. Directed by Lina Roessler. Stars Aubrey Plaza, Michael Caine and Scott Speedman. Opens in theatres Friday, September 17 in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, Saskatoon and Regina. Also available September 17 to rent or buy on the Apple TV app/iTunes and other VOD platforms.