Nostalgia is one of those things people love to look back on. For most of us this is about actual experiences we've lived and have such a fond positive (and often false recollection) with we need to recreate it.
That trip across the Adriatic. The glory days on the high school basketball team, The college class that changed your view of the world. To each one of us these were seismic, profound and life changing times.
Steve Young, the protagonist of the recently released "documentary", Bathtubs over Broadway
apparently had nothing of significance happen in his life ("I never had any interests when I was a kid" and few friends - until his long standing tenure as head writer of the highly successful Late Night with David Letterman television show ended.
I think I can imagine how directionless one's life can seem when for thirty years you float through four years at Harvard and 25 years of writing comedy could create a cocoon that protects you from the world at large. You've got security, prestige, a well paid job, the opportunity to create and satirize a world just outside your front door (on Broadway) without really dealing with day to day issues or problems.
Nice work, if you can get it.
You can practically see the loss and confusion on his face as he roots around the remains of the TV set, searches for memorabilia and as a final farewell (as depicted in the film) is seen dumpster diving before hugging a long time colleague and flatly saying "I'm not going back in". He's baffled about how to deal with his severance and straining to answer the question - what do I do now?
What indeed.
The answer, we learn, is - find a hobby about something arcane, pointless, superficial, and - to be kind - eccentric. Enter, The Industrial musical. What's an industrial musical you might ask?
It is a creation designed and developed for a unique, collected and in need of motivation corporate audience. Its a sales tool. An over priced, ill conceived and frequently campy, corny, and unnecessary staged production of that company's products and services for suppliers, distributors and sales and marketing people. It is the comic relief for days long meetings on a national or regional level of boring, monotonous, proselytizing. It was (and still is) an unadulterated effort for a company to boost its sense of self and do anything possible to make money.
To be clear there is no adorable Waiting for Guffman, look how charming the locals are aesthetic about it. These are huge multi nationals marketing themselves to each other, partners and distributors. This is really a sad and pathetic ethos. We're led to think "these companies take the art piece seriously" when we learn that the year a major Broadway play is funded with $400k pales to the $3-$4 million corporations are spending on these productions, we're supposed to be convinced.
There's also the literary and filmic trick they pull in the beginning, the very beginning, that this is a "secret world, we were never meant to see" as if they were revealing the covert Nicaraguan war the CIA and Bush administration hid from the public. Not the same. There's no secret code to get into the Skull and Bones, no lit match poem that gains entry to the Harvard lampoon or special trust fund that grants membership to some sort of Eyes Wide Shut bacchanalian orgy.
There's no there, there.
Ultimately this is a biopic masquerading as a legitimate documentary. So if you're expecting a Bowling for Columbine, Jiro Dreams of Sushi or Man on Wire epiphany - reset your expectations. It is a film the point of which you get in the first 45 mins. As such the movies twice as long as it needs to be. After 45 minutes its boring, repetitive, and superficial over and over.
The movie fails to come together because it is lost between being about a man looking for purpose at a life changing time and a subject matter that is over sentimentalized and not especially interesting. The subtext of this film is especially appealing to revisionist historians who think about "how great things used to be". But this can have troubling undertones because it is no longer a secret that "when things were great" they weren't great for everyone.
Thats what makes it nostalgic but nostalgic for an experience the protagonist never went through. It was best left as a punchline to a silly album that has faded into obscurity for a reason.