Eurovision: Song Contest and the Ugly Americans

I wasn’t much of a fan of Will Ferrell’s comedic style until one day I became a fan. It was his supporting role in The Wedding Crashers that changed my mind. His comedic style remained the same that vacuous stare, vapid line delivery, way over the top is what I didn’t like. Now I love it and see Ferrell as a sort of genius. It’s not as if now everything that Ferrell does is gold.

It’s not, but more times than not, I walk away feeling satisfied. Such is the case with Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. To be clear, Eurovision Song Contest is a mediocre story. It just happens to feature not just Ferrell in one of the leads, but the great Rachel McAdams in the other. I suppose it doesn’t hurt that the same director of The Wedding Crashers also directed Eurovision Song Contest: The Store of Fire Saga.

David Dobkin also directed Fred Claus and The Change-Up, so maybe he’s not a ringing endorsement of the film that I so clearly want to like. It’s not that I want to like Eurovision. I do like it. This is a Will Ferrell movie so intellectual pleasures such as subtlety are not in abundant supply. Ferrell plays Lars Ericssong an Icelandic singer/songwriter.

He makes music as a duo with his lifelong friend Sigrit Ericsdottir (McAdams). Despite her last name, Sigrit is probably not Lars sister. Or so the running gag goes. The gag underscores the sexual tension between Lars and Sigrit. Rachel McAdams is more than adorable as the long suffering unrequited lover.

Ferrell’s best movies (or at least my favorite Ferrell films) are those where he is paired with an actor who balances his faux characterizations. Truly, the better all the actors around Ferrell in any given film, the better his goofy shtick becomes. John C. Reily’s Cal Naughton Jr. in Talladega Nights brings a palpably human charm that nicely balances Ricky Bobby’s boorishness.

Woody Harrelson’s wry performance offers up the needed humanity to balance Jackie Moon’s absurd antics. With Eurovision it is McAdams who brings the necessary balance to help the audience love Lars like she does. Ferrell’s antics are fun, but McAdams is wildly underrated for her comic timing. Where Ferrell relishes the unbelievable gag, McAdams will make that gag believable.

I have to confess, I had never heard of Eurovision Song Contest until I saw this movie. I didn’t even realize this was actually a real thing until after I watched the movie. For anyone else who has never heard of this European song contest, it is an annual event that has been happening since 1956! Winning the Eurovision song contest has been a life long dream of Lars. Yet we are treated to a cheesy music video type version of one of their songs at the very beginning that gives us some clue to how bombastically goofy their pop music is.

It is unthinkable that such an amateurish music duo would even get a shot at performing for this annual European event. So, through a series of unfortunate events Fire Saga stumbles into getting their shot in the song contest. Some critics have complained that the movie is too long. Oh, boo-hoo I say to those critics.

Admittedly not all the jokes work and as is often the case plenty of the jokes fall flat. Even the jokes that fall flat are still fun. There is, for example, a lengthy scene that features a “song along,” apparently an homage to real contestants of Eurovision’s past. Calling a sing along a “song along” is mildly funny, but the length of song along does nothing at all to advance that joke or make it funnier. Still, it’s odd to complain that a movie about musicians competing against each other actually have a sing along.

In the end, this a romantic comedy. It is the love story that matters not who wins the song contest. That love story is largely carried by McAdams. While she’s the “straight man” to Ferrell’s antics, she, Ferrell and many of the cast (which includes Pierce Brosnan as Lars father) all seem to relish doing really bad Icelandic accents.

The bad accent joke comes with a punchline. At one point in Lars wild adventures he meets several American tourists and is epic in his rudeness to them. That rudeness is largely Lars critique of the “ugly American.” That’s about as subtle as a Will Ferrell movie gets.

An American actor doing a really bad Icelandic accent while criticizing American’s for being ugly is the kind of thing I’ve come to love about Ferrell. For me, this movie wasn’t “too long,” and the jokes didn’t fall any more flat than jokes tend to in a plethora of other comedies. For me, this was yet another fun Will Ferrell movie with the added bonus of Rachel McAdams.