Dean Works Better As A Contemplation of Coping With Grief Than As A Comedy

Dean is the feature film directorial debut for comedian Demetri Martin, who also writes and stars in this project which revolves around Martin playing artist Dean who is struggling with coming to terms with the death of his mother. His Dad, Robert (Kevin Kline), is trying to move forward by selling their old family home, engaging in new exercise routines and keeping in omnipresent contact with his son (which is made all the more easier by the use of his new handy-dandy smartphone). Dean, on the other hand, is looking to be more reclusive as he shuts himself out from his father and tries to avoid fully confronting the internal emotional pain that his mom's passing has caused for him.



Part of Dean's way of running from his troubles involves him going to Los Angeles, California to meet up with an ad agency that wants to use his drawings in an ad campaign and while there, he strikes up some romance with a woman named Nicky (played with delightful energy by Gillian Jacobs). This tale is one that heavily utilizes awkward cringe humor stemming from Dean's behavior that is apparently a heavy part of his stand-up comedy routine (the recurring musical instruments he utilizes in said routines do not make an appearance here). Despite being directly in the wheelhouse that Martin has been performing in for well over a decade now, those types of jokes are, interestingly, the weakest part of the film for my money.

A first act heavily leaning on Dean acting like an oblivious jerk to his friends and family (including an ill-fated best man toast at his best friend's wedding) delivers a number of gags that are awkward to watch but not in the way Martin's script likely intended. Too many of these jokes feel generic, they don't reveal all that much new about the character of Dean nor are they all that humorous on their own. There's also a recurring theme in these early scenes that seems to be heavily critical of modern-day technology also feels poorly handled, especially since it involves already outdated tech like Google Glass, and ends up getting dumped early on in the story, making it feel like a weird thematic dead end in the story.

More successful in terms of humor are simplistic drawings (apparently also a fixture of Martin's prior comedic endeavors) that appear throughout the movie and provide amusing accompaniments to certain moments. Small inventive visual touches such as Dean and a California friend going into a club and then needing all their dialogue subtitled due to how loud the music is in the club also got some laughs from me. Interestingly, Dean is a mixed bag as a comedy, but when it's working as a more thoughtful & somber rumination on coping with the death of a loved one, which it primarily becomes in the third act, it finds far more success.

Even when the dialogue intended to be profound in these sequences starts to sound more hokey, it feels like Dean is actually getting at some interesting truths regarding how long-lasting the process of coping with grief is. I haven't been able to find anything confirming or denying that this motion picture draws on Demetri Martin's own personal experiences with coping with the death of a loved one, but it certainly feels emotionally potent enough in it's best moments to feel like it could have. The overall handling of that part of the story is good enough for me to consider Dean a decent inaugural foray into directing for Demetri Martin, though hopefully the comedic portions of future productions are more successfully handeled.