REVIEWED - OVERNIGHT: You might describe this hugely enjoyable - if formally unremarkable - documentary as a neat complement to Lost in La Mancha. Whereas that film urged us to feel sympathy for Terry Gilliam and his brave crew as weather, illness and unrealistic ambition overcame a worthwhile project, Overnight invites us to bemoan the rise and cheer the decline of a film-maker as rich in arrogance as he is poor in judgement.
The film has interesting things to say about the sinister power of Harvey Weinstein. It tells us sad stories about the danger of achieving your dreams. But, really, it is most valuable as a source of delicious Schadenfreude.
In 1997 Troy Duffy, a bartender in an agreeably unpretentious West Hollywood boozer, secured an extraordinary deal with Weinstein's Miramax pictures. Troy was handed $300,000 to direct a film of his first script, The Boondock Saints. His grungy rock band, The Brood, were signed up to provide the soundtrack and, to further sweeten the story for the trade papers, Harvey would buy the bar, PJ Sloan's, for its newly successful employee.
A delightful Cinderella story? Not quite. Duffy turns out to be a brash philistine with near psychotic delusions about the breadth of his talent. Keanu Reeves will, he declares, with deep, but unintended, irony, never appear in one of his films. "I love Branagh," he says before having an oily conversation with our Ken. When he sets the phone down his opinion of the Belfast actor is expressed through one profane monosyllable.
Troy's confidence is so great that he asks two members of his so-called syndicate, Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith, to make a documentary charting the triumph of his will. That is not quite how Overnight worked out.
Eventually, Harvey stops taking the director's calls and the project drifts into turnaround. Troy, who, in his defence, is impressively determined, perseveres and manages to get The Boondock Saints made as an indie. But none of the major distributors will touch it. Has Weinstein poisoned the water? Others aside from Duffy think so.
Ultimately, what turns the viewer against Troy is not his arrogance, his brashness or his belligerence; it is his hypocrisy. This brave rebel, a declared breaker of rules, will happily chew lumps off agents, film students and his unfortunate brother.But he laughs sycophantically at Billy Connolly's jokes and, before things turn sour, praises Weinstein in the most sugary terms.
He is, one suspects, just as big a phoney as the guys in the suits. Unhappily, the success on video of The Boondock Saints suggests that Troy Duffy may rise again.
