I'M STILL HERE Directed by Casey Affleck, Club, IFI, Dublin, 108 min
IN FEBRUARY 2009, a dishelleved, monosyllabic Joaquin Phoenix appeared on The David Letterman Show. In lieu of witty anecdotes and tales from the set, Phoenix seemed content to let his unkempt, unsanitary new beard do that talking. "What can you tell us about your days with the Unabomber?" quipped his bemused host.
By that time we had all heard the rumours; Phoenix had lost it, he was quitting acting, he was producing a rap album with P Diddy. For journalists, the Letterman appearance was confirmation of their worst suspicions. But while they got busy with amateur psychology (Did he ever recover from his brother River’s overdose? Didn’t he grow up with that wacko cult?), savvier viewers immediately saw the punchline coming.
Sure enough, the star has since admitted that his transformation into line-snorting, hooker-chasing trainwreck was a prank cooked up with his brother-in-law, Casey Affleck. But even without the recent confession, I'm Still Here,Affleck's documentary film of Joaquin's faux breakdown, can't quite conceal its mischievous intentions. We're barely five minutes in when Sean Penn, Phoenix's friend and an actor who ought to be well able to affect misery, visibly corpses. Others follow suit.
To keep the gullible onside, the film opens with "authentic" 1982 footage of Phoenix as a boy in Panama (although even this was staged in Hawaii). We jump to the present day, where a disillusioned Joaquin Phoenix rages against, well, Joaquin Phoenix, the Oscar- nominated star of Walk the Line and Gladiator. The actor soon dismisses his work and himself as "fraudulent" and embarks on a new career as a hip-hop artist.
Throughout this gonzo enterprise, the subject is seen to use and abuse his resident lackeys Antony and Larry; “Don’t do your thing,” hisses Phoenix as Antony takes him to meet P Diddy. “Don’t tell people you’re from Jersey.”
Like many of Andy Kaufman’s more elaborate pranks, the film is often content to play for discomfort rather than comedy. Add to this an indulgent running time and we’re left with a project that is more successful as a piece of performance art than as a movie.
Still, as a working diorama of How Entertainment News Works, I'm Still Herehas plenty of merit. The journalists who disseminated the story in the first place may well cry foul, but if they actually believed that Joaquin Phoenix had turned into the kind of guy who'd dismiss Barack Obama's inauguration as "a movie premiere with less pussy", they deserve to feel foolish.
