The Liberace of Polka
Seen on Netflix
The Polka King, a movie about how Jan Lewan oompapa’d his way to running a successful Ponzi scheme, was probably not a hard sell for writer/director Maya Forbes (The Larry Sanders Show, Infinitely Polar Bear).
But writing this atonal comedy was surely a demoralizing affair.
We imagine her, in Hamlet-like paralysis, wondering “should I put in some tuba jokes?” then finally “what is this story even about?”
And there’s her problem. The very first frame of the movie announces, white on black, “This really happened...in Pennsylvania,” as if to suggest that we should find what follows so bewildering that, come on...it had to be a movie! And sure: the story ofJan Lewan, the “Liberace of Polka,” his Ponzi scheme, and his improbable adventures (including an audience with the Pope and a Grammy nomination), is ripe for a retelling. But what sort of story is it that begs to be told?
Forbes has marketed the movie as a Jack Black vehicle. She has cast it as a comedy – with Jason Shwartzman as Lewan’s (apocryphal) star clarinetist Mickey Pizzazz, Jenny Slate as Lewan’s ditsy wife Maria, and JB Smoove as the government investigator who brings the whole scheme down.
But she has not written a comedy. She serves up The Polka King bone dry – The Producers told in the awkward style of Napoleon Dynamite. Her gambit, we suspect, is that the absurdity of the premise, amplified by Jack Black, will carry the picture.
But the inherent comedic value of tubas, clarinets, sequins, and funny accents wears thin early on. And while the actors do their best - especially Vanessa Beyer as a costumed bear with a taste for married men, and Jacki Weaver as Lewan's skeptical mother-in-law - we are eventually left with a flat re-enactment of a story about a conman who deceived and hustled those closest to him. As the tale turns more and more bizarre, with Lewan eventually rigging a Ms. Pennsylvania contest so that Maria can win, the less funny, and more sinister, The Polka King becomes.