The Polka King – **

The Polka King (Maya Forbes, 2017) – Comedy – Global Acquisition

Reported Acquisition Price: “High Seven Figures”

Jan Lewan (Jack Black) is a Polish immigrant living in northern Pennsylvania who is cheerful and energetic despite the many hardships he faces. Struggling to get by working odd jobs, he puts together a band of musicians – including close friend Mickey Pizazz (Jason Schwartzman) – to play polka music and persuades friends and neighbors to invest in the venture. The band seems to become more and more successful and Jan rides the momentum of its popularity to charm and ultimately marry Marla (Jenny Slate), an aspiring beauty pageant contestant. Behind the scenes however, the investors are being swindled by Jan, who becomes increasingly desperate as he creates scam after scam to conceal previous ones and to keep Marla happy.

Even in his best performances Jack Black is for me a difficult comedian to enjoy. His style of comedy is not terribly sophisticated, to understate the case somewhat, and often depends on audiences enjoying his hammy schtick rather than finding any interesting plot or characters. I would be hard pressed to think of a film of his that I liked, but this one is worse than most. For 95 minutes we get Black and his ridiculous Polish accent, making the same contorted face and doing little else to invest Lewan or his story with any genuine pathos and precious little humor. All in all, the film brought to mind Black’s other true crime story Bernie which was a stalwart of Netflix’s licensed offerings for a while and which also struck me as a pointless and annoying film.

Nearly equally irritating in this film is Jason Schwartzman as the ostensibly conflicted and corrupted Mickey Pizzazz. Here Schwartzman shows us once again that he can do little more than the deadpan performances that made him famous early in his career. Throughout, he generally seems like the poor man’s Eugene Levy to Black’s poor man’s John Candy. One can’t help think that Candy and Levy would have crushed it in a story like this and such a thought also simultaneously makes you realize just how dated a comedy story about polka is in this day and age. I doubt this film has made anyone think that the music can experience a revival in pop culture and maybe somewhere Weird Al Yankovic is shedding copious tears about this.

Not only is the script thus built around a pretty dated joke, but it also does little to tell us why we should care about this character or his story. The film’s one bright spot in terms of character and performance is Jenny Slate’s Marla who is at once thrilled to be married to the small town star but also feels herself trapped in his shadow. Her desperation is very compelling and adds emotional weight to the climactic beauty pageant section of the film that Black otherwise plays with all the emotional complexity of an overboiled pierogi.

Maya Forbes’s direction also gives the film a sense of place in rural Pennsylvania that is bleak and imprisoning, making you think that there was perhaps a more interesting film here that got drowned out by Black’s hammy overacting. Being from Western New York myself – not far from this part of Pennsylvania – I really appreciated this lyrical dimension of the film, even as I felt like it was squandered in the grander scheme of the film.

The Polka King was bought by Netflix out of Sundance in 2017, a very busy festival for the company. The film received some good critical notices after its premier, but like many Sundance favorites, it suffers considerably outside the thin air and glamor that seem to confound critics during the festival.

Perhaps for that reason, Netflix sat on the film for nearly a year before releasing it in January of the following year. The company did also license a documentary about the real life Jan Lewan and generally also promoted the film as a Jack Black star vehicle, attempting perhaps to ride the coattails of the actor’s big hit Jumanji which was in theaters at that moment.

Netflix Tendencies

Netflix Stars

Jenny Slate appears in a number of Netflix original works, including the series Big Mouth and Lady Dynamite as well as the film Brain on Fire. She also had a run on Parks and Recreation, which is a very popular licensed series on the service.

Jackie Weaver appears in three other Netflix original films: Bird Box, Irreplaceable You and Small Crimes.

Vanessa Bayer is one of the stars of the Netflix original movie Ibiza and also appears in the original series Love.

ShivHans Pictures also produced Beirut which is available in many countries as a Netflix original. The company also tried to sell its film Hotel Mumbai to Netflix for a number of territories before running into legal complications.

Pointless Cameos

While the idea of the Bitsy Bear character is actually kind of funny, there is no logical reason that Vanessa Bayer would play her. This very talented comic actress doesn’t say anything onscreen and is therefore criminally underused.

Underrepresented Groups

The film is directed and co-written by female film-maker Maya Forbes.