Star-studded cast can't save screwball homage 'She's Funny That Way'

In She's Funny That Way, Peter Bogdanovich returns to feature films for the first time since 2001's The Cat's Meow. She's Funny is a loving ode to screwball comedies from the Golden Age of Hollywood that never approaches the films it pays homage to.

The cast is star-studded - Jennifer Aniston! Owen Wilson! Will Forte! Even Cybill Shepherd! - but none of these actors feels particularly comfortable handling the rat-a-tat dialogue that characterizes the best screwball. The script is never as funny as the film thinks it is, either. Still, She's Funny That Way goes down smooth, even if it makes you wish you were watching His Girl Friday or Bringing Up Baby instead.

The appropriately complicated story is told through an unnecessary framing device. Actress Isabella Patterson (Imogen Poots, with a Bugs Bunny New Yawk accent) tells the story of her rise to fame to a cynical journalist (Illeana Douglas). Patterson, a.k.a. Glow, starts her tale as a call girl who happens to get hired by theater director Arnold Albertson (Owen Wilson), who gets just as excited about saving sex workers - giving them $30,000 if they promise to quit their night jobs and follow their dreams - as he does about eventually sleeping with them (of course, he's also an attentive lover).

Unfortunately for Arnold, this all comes back to haunt him. Isabella's dream is to be an actress, and she happens to perfectly fit the part of a call girl in Arnold's next work, which just so happens to star his wife, Delta Simmons (Kathryn Hahn) and her action-star ex-lover (Rhys Ifans), who caught Arnold and Isabella post-tryst.

Aniston pops in as Isabella's horrible therapist, while Forte is her playwright boyfriend (he penned Arnold's project) who develops a crush on Isabella.

Bogdanovich has a history with screwball - notably the Barbra Streisand-starring What's Up, Doc? - and while She's Funny That Way never reaches those heights, it's not a slog either. While the cast is not universally adept at the rhythms of screwball (Wilson and Aniston in particular feel out of place here), they are all game to be outsize and ridiculous whenever necessary.

Bogdanovich is a cunning student of the films he's paying homage to, but She's Funny That Way does not have the heart of the best of the genre he loves so much.

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