There was a time when Hollywood worked under the so-called star system. On broad terms, the industry would elevate some actors and actresses to Olympian levels, creating a Midas-like aura around them and everything they touched. This would fuel the dream-like, subtle qualities around their objects, assuring that their only presence in a movie would mean the perfect marketing campaign. The star system, with the rise of different artistic currents in the post 50s world cinema, would be dimmed and weakened to a degree, but would ulteriorly remain invict. The roots of this deification still pervive in modern blockbuster engines, and not small numbers of audience will go watch a hit movie just because of the artists who work in it.
“Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in a spectacular action comedy that exacerbates their qualities! The Fall Guy must be quite a ride!” is perhaps the first, quasi-gutural, reaction coming from the average Western audience after having witnessed the trailer of today’s movie. And I feel it is a very natural reaction – even a disgusting cinema pleb as myself got it. It is even more surprising case, since I am usually very careful with action flicks (I still have the ick of the stereotypical grayish 90s-00s just-frantic-action movies – unjustified, of course, but reptilian-brained reactions are like this). My reason to justify going to the (no more and no less) first session of The Fall Guy the day it was released was “I like Ryan Gosling. Let’s see what he does.”
Somehow, the star system still pervives. And, even more funnily, The Fall Guy talks and makes up an ironic story about it.
The Fall Guy belongs to one of my favourite non-official genres: cinema about cinema, movies that shed light and make up creative meta stories about how they are made, or the world around them. Meta is, precisely, a descriptor that works wonders for this movie. Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, two stars in real life, play the role of invisible members of a movie crew -the stuntman and the régisseuse-, who become the stars in their own personal story making a cheesy, almost parodical, action movie when the real stars are an obstacle. We get story-in-a-story-in-a-story, a triple loop that is conscious of its absurd self and makes fun of it, putting in the reality plane all things that happen in its fiction-within-fiction, many times simultaneously discussing itself and its rocambolesque content. It is so delightfully absurd and looped that it jumps out of all conventions and just knows that fun is all what is left and all what it can offer.
Fun is, also precisely, the other descriptor that works wonders for The Fall Guy. Everything just meshes. I do not remember the last time I came out of a screening room with a more intense sensation of having had a continuous blast of hype – perhaps when I watched Belle two years ago. It is, genuinely, a movie where you can perceive that everybody who worked in it was having real fun. The widely recognised chemistry shared between the two main characters is not unreal – its condition as a movie about the invisible crew making a kitschy movie in fiction means that all the team involved plays on different levels to contribute and show how wonderful making cinema can be – even when it is a perfectly marketised star system product. Being conscious of itself and nonchalantly opening itself surely helps.
Because, what is cinema? Aside of all artistic and philosophic-political discourse around it, cinema’s raison d’être is not other than entertainment. And thus, we close the loop. Stars, invisible crews, stunts, technicians, locations, stories, action, fun, romance, meta… The Fall Guy feels exactly what it wants to be. The aftertaste of cinema, something familiar, peculiar, delightful and that undescribable reason why we watch movies. This is it, and I love it.