Jeff Garlin plays Larry David’s manager on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and his movie apes the TV show’s main conceit: narcissistic eccentrics delivering ostentatiously deadpan dialogue.
Here, Garlin’s a comedian named Max, who has a beautiful house, a beautiful wife (Nia Vardalos) and a hopelessly unathletic son who’s trying to play baseball. The slender premise is that Max decides to make a movie about the idiocy of Little League parents. The funniest of these include Jami Gertz, as a control-freak, nutrition-obsessed mom who’d fit in well in Park Slope; Bob Odenkirk, as a coach with a lousy day job and a brother who once stole his prom date; and Gina Gershon and Kerri Kenney-Silver, as a lesbian couple. Upon learning of Max’s film, Kenney-Silver says it’s all right as long as her son isn’t played by one of “[expletive] Will Smith’s kids.”
The movie was largely improvised, which lends itself more to scenes than a feature-length film. The finale has an actual arc, which turns on a creepy Little League rule — no coincidence that it’s also the funniest thing in the film.