“I Love You, Daddy” Review: Louis C.K.’s Cancelled Movie Reeks of Impunity

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“They’re going to have to start providing barf bags at the movies,” I wrote in my notebook, five or so minutes into the press screening that I attended, in October, of Louis C.K.’s film “I Love You, Daddy.” The image that elicited this thought was of the actress Chloë Grace Moretz, in a very small bikini, shot from above and behind, the camera practically panting down the back of her exposed neck. Moments later, she saunters down a flight of stairs and straight into Louis’s arms. “I love you, Daddy,” she coos, kissing him smack on his bald head. You could play a drinking game and take a shot every time Moretz speaks that phrase, but that would likely result in alcohol poisoning, and also require you to watch the movie.

It now seems that few people will get that chance. “I Love You, Daddy,” which Louis wrote (from a story that he conceived with Vernon Chatman), directed, financed himself, and shot in secret, in June, was slated to open on November 17th. On Friday morning, the movie was pulled by its distributor in the wake of the Times report, published the previous day, detailing Louis’s habit of compulsively masturbating in front of female comedians. On Friday afternoon, Louis acknowledged the truth of the claims against him. The timing is uncanny. The film, which centers on the sexual machinations of powerful men, reeks of impunity. Like so many of Louis’s standup jokes that purport to skewer the grossness of men, it could only have been made by a person confident that he would never have to answer for the repulsive things he’s long been rumored to have done, let alone be caught—if I may borrow a choice word from the recently disgraced Leon Wieseltier—in a major moment of public “reckoning.”

Louis plays Glen Topher, a wealthy, divorced TV writer who lives in a luxurious New York penthouse. Moretz is China, his seventeen-year-old daughter and still technically a high-school student, though she doesn’t spend much time in class. In that first drooling shot, she is freshly returned from spring break in Florida. (Just in case his audience might have forgotten what a badass breaker of taboos he is, Louis uses China’s tan as a pretext to drop the N-word.) China has come to ask Glen for use of his shared jet so that she can go back to Florida to party some more, a request she knows he can’t refuse. Nubile and almost criminally naïve, China knows how to play her father like a fiddle. With the exception of Ivanka Trump, I have never known a teen-age girl to spend so much time on her daddy’s lap. Glen is more than happy to have her there, but he does try every so often to flex his atrophied parenting muscles. “Feminism is about taking care of yourself and being independent and being on your own,” he lectures China. “I think Gloria Steinem would tell you to get a waitressing job and read.”

Before China can take his advice, she is noticed by Leslie Goodwin (John Malkovich), a famous director in his late sixties whose taste for very young women is as legendary as his movies. Leslie is rumored to have had sex with a child, but, as Glen tells China—and as Louis told the Times in September, when asked about his own bad behavior—a rumor is only a rumor. Leslie, who speaks in a guru’s murmur and dresses in ascots and caftans, knows how to flatter and charm; he is skilled at grooming his prey with lines like “It’s not just about your perfect body; it’s about your humanity.” In one scene, Leslie runs into China at Barneys. He likes to watch rich teen-age girls as they shop, he explains, and soon China is in a dressing room, trying on outfit after outfit as Leslie describes the characters that he envisions her becoming with each costume change. She is his Galatea come to life, his blank canvas to paint, or to destroy, as he sees fit.

The only generous way to read “I Love You, Daddy” is as a portrait of male cowardice. What kind of man would be so shamefully pathetic as to avoid confronting the famous geezer who may or may not be screwing his underage daughter because that geezer has offered to read his latest script? The same man, presumably, who winces but doesn’t intervene as his dumbo comedian buddy (Charlie Day) describes, at gleeful length, all the ways that the man’s daughter has probably been fucked on spring break. As is often the case with the roles that Louis writes for himself, there is a strong note of masochistic pleasure in this extreme passivity. Louis, famously obsessive and controlling of his work—he writes, he directs, he edits, he acts, he produces, he distributes, he does it all—likes to play losers who are at the mercy of others. Often, those others are women. It’s hard not to wonder, in the wake of Thursday’s revelations, to what extent Louis has used this persona to shield his reputation. But cowardice is not just an avoidance of a moral stance; it is a moral stance, too, and not a flattering one. “Doesn’t society have to protect her?” Glen asks Grace Cullen (Rose Byrne), the beautiful actress slated to star in his upcoming show, as they discuss China. “Society?” she responds. “You mean you?”

Grace is right to ask, but the point of the film is not to seriously interrogate the failings of Glen. The point is to ask Tough Questions, to explore the dark place where morality tangles with human nature—which, for Louis’s intents and purposes here, is equivalent to male desire. Leslie is a stand-in of sorts for Woody Allen, and the movie, which was shot (shoddily, it must be said) on black-and-white 35-mm. film, is a pastiche of Allen’s “Manhattan” style. Must we believe the terrible things we hear about artists we admire? Louis is asking. And, if we do believe them, must we do something about it?

As we now know, he’s not posing these questions in good faith. Halfway through the film there is a debate, if it can be called that, between Glen and Grace. They have just slept together; in a postcoital lull, they argue about what may or may not be transpiring between Leslie and China. Grace is unsympathetic to Glen’s concern. When she was a teen-ager, she tells him, she was in a relationship with a much older man—Leslie himself, it seems. Is Glen now presuming to tell her that she wasn’t in control of her own sexuality? That her desires weren’t her own, and she didn’t know what she was doing? That she was raped? How condescending! How anti-feminist! It’s a point that’s genuinely worth discussing, but inept Glen can only sputter banalities in response. China is not like Grace, he points out: “She’s like a Disney princess on speed! She knows nothing!”

That’s true enough. For “I Love You, Daddy” to work as a staging ground for the points that Louis wants to make—that young women’s sexual attractiveness gives them power over the sorry men who lust after them; that, in spite of that power, young women are more likely than not to be careless and foolish, and to bring trouble and disgrace on themselves—China has to be an empty vessel, an absolute airhead with no sense of self and no mind of her own. Her attraction to Leslie wouldn’t be remotely plausible otherwise; she would see him for what he is—ridiculous—and laugh him out of the room. In the end, it is China who makes herself absurd. She is the one who throws herself at Leslie, not the other way around, and so it is she who ends up rejected and humiliated. Leslie glides away in his Moroccan slippers with his integrity intact. He is Saint Anthony warding off the devil; the young temptress is discarded, and the important artist can at last get back to his work. (Between Javier Bardem in “Mother!” and Malkovich here, this year’s Oscar for Best Actor Scribbling Fatuously in a Notebook is going to be a toss-up, though at least Malkovich plays the asinine artistic Svengali with wit.) What does Leslie do now that he is freed from female distraction? He makes an Emmy-winning TV show, of course.

As for China, her redemption comes in the form of a job at the perfume counter of Bloomingdale’s and a shared apartment in Harlem: she has decided to take Daddy’s counsel and go get her independence. There is something depressingly subdued about her, in the film’s last scene, a deadened quality that is supposed to pass for maturity. Such is the film’s final point where women are concerned: stop flirting and mooching and get to work, because, if you don’t have to depend on men for money, they can’t control you, or harm you, or fuck you over. But, of course, they can, and do, in life as in “I Love You, Daddy.” The women in Louis’s film come in three flavors: the Shrew (Helen Hunt, her mouth pursed into a furious line, as Glen’s bitter ex-wife); the Seductress (Grace, with China in training); and, saddest of all, the Supporter (Edie Falco, as Glen’s long-suffering producer, and Pamela Adlon, as Glen’s tough-talking ex, a supporter in denial). “Sorry, women,” Glen says, at one point, abstractly addressing all of them at once, the better to avoid something that could be construed as a real apology.

China’s fate echoes an intention that Louis has often expressed regarding his own daughters: to cure them of the spoiled upbringing he has given them by refusing them any money when they come of age. He wants them to work for a living, just like he has. Like so many Fathers of Daughters, I guess, he’s counting on them not running into dudes like him on the job.

Sometimes the culture provides the cure for its own ills. In this case, the antidote to “I Love You, Daddy” is Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” a movie about teen-age girls that is actually interested in them as people. The rapturous praise that Gerwig’s movie has been getting speaks to the hunger that so many of us have for depictions of young women as beings with brains as well as bodies. Like China, Lady Bird, played by the fabulous Saiorse Ronan, is a high-school senior bored in class and ready to be out in the world. She is smart, funny, and bold; she speaks her mind, pursues sex and friendship, makes mistakes, embarrasses herself, gets hurt, hurts others, and tries her best to set things right again. I’d like to imagine a situation in which China and Lady Bird cross paths in New York, though I’m not sure I’d wish that on Lady Bird. On the other hand, China has some sense in her yet. “Daddy, this movie is about fucking men,” she tells Glen as they watch a female revenge fantasy on TV together. “They’ve fucked us for long enough. Now it’s time to fuck them.” Louis wrote that line. No one should be less surprised by his fate than him.

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