Many auteur film projects could be described as masturbatory by the ungenerous critic, but writer/director/star Adam Driver's latest "Forget It, Adam: It's Hollywood" is one of the few that could best be described as figurative autoerotic asphyxiation.
Hardboiled LA detective Adam Shotgun (Driver) is called out of retirement to investigate the suspicious on-set death of Hollywood actor Adam Driver (also Driver.) His client is the mysterious femme fatale and alleged jilted ex-lover of the victim, Eve Passenger (Driver in a wig.) Shotgun's questioning of witnesses and digging through Ridley Scott's garbage is interrupted perhaps one too many times by traumatic flashbacks of the accidental death of Shotgun's infant son Le Self (Driver, not digitally de-aged at all, wearing a bonnet and diaper.)
What should be a dramatic confrontation with prime murder suspect Ridley Scott (Owen Teale) is somewhat deflated when Shotgun breaks into a non-sequitur series of petty accusations of alleged indignities suffered by the real Adam Driver at the hands of the real Scott on the set of The Last Duel (2021.) A critic who says that a film feels voyeuristic is usually praising it, but it is painfully clear that this film is for one person and one person only, and not in a good way. Not even the bloody and admittedly well-choreographed brawl with a pair of prop swords could let me shake the feeling that by remaining in my seat I was complicit in something deeply unsavory and perhaps borderline illegal. In a subsequent confrontation, when Scott killed and cannibalized Shotgun in a Subway restaurant that was central to one of the aforementioned petty grievances, my feeling of relief that this debacle was nearly over soon turned to dread upon realizing that we were only around the 45-minute mark.
Sure enough, the film rambles on for another 90 minutes, which I only inferred from checking my phone afterward, as the final two acts of the film are an incoherent nightmare that made time seem to lose all meaning. Included in this muddle are a surprisingly derogatory and hard-hitting eulogy for Adam Driver delivered by his mother (Driver in a different wig) and a bizarre but convincing PowerPoint presentation implicating a teenaged Adam Driver as an instrumental accomplice in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
I come out of the ordeal (and ordeal it was) with a mix of feelings, none of them to the credit of the film or its maker. I can only hope that Driver receives the caring professional help he needs for his issues with anger management, interpersonal skills, survivor's guilt, and possible lack of a stable sense of self. I certainly do not wish to stigmatize the act of coming forward about any of these, and yet I might dare to gently advise those of you suffering in silence to come forward in a slightly different way.