Evidently improvised for the most part by its able cast of comedians, Zak Penn’s “The Grand” scores mild points in the tradition of Christopher Guest’s movies. It doesn’t have Guest’s sweetness, and the Las Vegas setting grows tinny after a while, but this movie does let some funny people loose.
The plot is organized around a big winner-take-all poker tournament. In mockumentary fashion, we are introduced to the odds-on favorites, and then treated to the game itself.
Around this core is the story of a recovered party-holic named “One-Eyed” Jack Faro (Woody Harrelson in a dandy hippie wig), whose grandfather willed him a Vegas casino. Jack has run the place into the ground, between his stays in rehab.
Winning the tournament would be big for Jack. But there’s also a crusty old-timer (Dennis Farina), a cheery online amateur (Richard Kind), a high-functioning, socially maladjusted mama’s boy (Chris Parnell), and a housewife (Cheryl Hines) whose winnings have allowed her husband (Ray Romano) to specialize in fantasy football.
Meanwhile, her brother (David Cross) suffers under his inferiority complex; their father (Gabe Kaplan, the long-retired “Welcome Back, Kotter” star and real-life poker player) always liked sis best.
The weirdest player is a guy known as The German, played by director Werner Herzog (who worked with Penn on “Incident at Loch Ness”). Even in this cast of comics, Herzog has some of the funniest moments in the film, as he sends up his own dour image (when we meet him, he is denouncing coffee as “the beverage of the cowards” and declaring that he must kill something every day).
These are good people; Hines, the wife on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” has a deadly deadpan delivery, and “Saturday Night Live” stalwart Parnell is spot-on. Andrea Savage is arresting as the assistant to a Vegas developer (Michael McKean, no slouch in the improv department himself), and folks like Jason Alexander and Mike Epps contribute small bits.
The early monologues by Hines, Romano and Cross are so good they raise big hopes for the rest of the movie, which settles into a pleasant-but-not-killer groove. (Plus, it’s too long at 104 minutes.) But if you like some of these people and you find the world of Texas Hold ‘Em intrinsically funny, “The Grand” should pay off.
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