Watching Brad Garrett playing Jackie Gleason in last night's TV-movie, I was struck by a rather basic thought: These things never work for me. When someone famous is being portrayed — someone whose real face and voice are embedded in my mind — I can never shake the sense that I'm watching an imitation. Moreover, it's always an imitation that's gone on way too long. Most impressionists learn never not to do that because, invariably, they reach the stage where they really don't look or sound like the target. An entire movie is always too long.
I remember that film where Rod Steiger played W.C. Fields. Visually, he was like one of those flicker-rings that shows you a different image when you move it slightly. Steiger would look like Fields, then he'd turn a bit and look like Rod Steiger, then he'd turn a little more and look like Fields again…and of course, throughout, he managed to sound like Rod Steiger doing a bad W.C. Fields impression. It was a stunt, not a performance, and you watched it instead of the picture. It was like watching a marionette show where the strings are just too blatant to allow you to pretend the puppets are alive.
Brad Garrett probably played Gleason about as well as anyone could, this side of Nathan Lane…but not for one moment did he stop being Brad Garrett for me. (Actually, I take that back: In the scenes where they slapped appliances on his face to add weight, he stopped being Brad Garrett and started being Mr. Creosote from the Monty Python film.) Mostly though, I'm sitting there thinking, "Hey, from this angle, Brad Garrett looks a little like Gleason…oh, Brad Garrett didn't deliver that line the way Gleason would have…hmm, Brad Garrett almost caught Gleason's body language there…" Overall, he didn't convince me he was Gleason, nor did he convince me the guy he was playing was a performer talented enough to be called "The Great One." I don't think he even convinced me he wasn't 6'8" tall.
But I'm not sure any of that was Garrett's fault. Like I said, these things never work for me. I wonder if they work for anyone.