The Impostors

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 23, 1998 by Joseph Cunneen

If you're going to The Impostors (Fox Searchlight Pictures), an old-fashioned farce set in an imaginary 1930s, be sure not to be late. As the credits begin to unwind, Arthur (Stanley Tucci) and Maurice (Oliver Platt) are at adjoining tables at a Central Park cafe. Minor misunderstandings quickly escalate in the best Laurel and Hardy tradition and nearby patrons are understandably terrified when things get to the point where knives are drawn. Since Maurice and Arthur are unemployed actors who like to rehearse their routines in public, no physical ham results, but Arthur is outraged. Maurice, carried away by the drama, staggers to a hammy collapse, forgetting that it was his partner's turn to play the death scene.

The two men are reconciled the next morning and continue their zany practice scenes in their small room. Hopes of landing acting jobs, however, seem bleak until they encounter Woody Allen in a cameo appearance as casting director for his own play. Unfortunately, Allen gets a call from his wife, who says she's leaving him and withdrawing her money from the show.

Things only get worse after they win free tickets to a performance of "Hamlet" played by the self-inflated and heavy-drinking English actor, Jeremy Burton (Alfred Molina). Maurice is delivering a bravura denunciation of Burton at Sardi's after the show when the latter comes in, prompting a fight that largely destroys the premises and forces Arthur and Maurice to run from the police. With the mad logic of a Marx brothers movie, they hide in a packing crate next to a dock and quickly fall asleep. By the time they wake up, of course, they have been hoisted on board a luxury liner headed for France.

The rest of "The Impostors" takes place at sea, in more ways than one. Maurice and Arthur try to pass themselves off as stewards, but Burton, a last-minute passenger, recognizes them and demands that the captain hunt them down. It would be easy to complain that writer Stanley Tucci has loaded the ship with too many characters and subplots, but as director he has assembled some of the best comic actors in New York and made sure that their sense of timing is as fine as his own.

A sweetly worried young woman steward (Lili Taylor), when not fending off the heavily Germanic advances of the head steward (Campbell Scott) or carrying on a romance with a member of the staff (Richard Jenkins) assigned to capture the stowaways, tries to find places for the actors to hide. Dana Ivey is a conniving mother with a seeming wallflower daughter, Hope Davis, who promptly falls in love with a suicidal band singer (Steve Buscemi). Isabella Rossellini turns up as a deposed Baltic queen. In addition, a gangster and his moll are hatching an illegal scheme, an African sheik is looking for passion, a crazy tennis pro decides Maurice reminds him of a Greek statue, and the first mate is preparing to erase all class differences by blowing up the ship.

There's method in all the madness, and if Arthur's insistence that good actors play their characters small is contradicted by the movie's outsized gestures and exaggerated pratfalls, Tucci's precise direction keeps it on a sure course to laughter.