Anybody who knows anything about Chevy Chase knows that he’s an asshole. He started fights with castmates on Saturday Night Live, made horribly distasteful comments about his friends — often in the form of homophobic, sexist, or racist jokes — and squabbled with many of his directors and writers. Known for his stint on the earliest days of SNL as well as films like Fletch, Caddyshack, and National Lampoon’s Vacation, Chase is also the subject of a new documentary, produced by CNN Films, titled I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not.
Chase is the kind of person to tell the director of the first and only documentary about his life, Marina Zenovich, that she’s not smart enough to peel back his assuredly many layers. And after only a few minutes of the film, which sticks to a very linear, very safe, and very boring A-to-B-to-C structure, the viewer is forced to come to the same conclusion.
A Dull Play-By-Play Of Chevy Chase’s Career
The problems that plague this dull wannabe hitpiece are the same faced by every single one of these docu-biographies, which are the sorts of films that are either made about dead people or about creatives who understand they have little anymore to offer the world. These films have nothing to say about their subjects, instead content to run through their careers in chronological order, from their unlikely discovery to their big success and inevitable descent into irrelevance, early death, or substance abuse — or sometimes, all three. Saturday Night Live, that venerable East Coast institution that seems to edge farther and farther into humorless pointlessness with each passing year, has already been examined by similarly uncritical portraits of comedians like Chris Farley, John Belushi, Eddie Murphy, and Harper Steele as well as features like Saturday Night, SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night, and Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music. A documentary about Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live, has just debuted in theaters.
In I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, Chevy Chase appears, of course, as the primary talking head, less breaking down his career than reacting with vague disinterest to the sordid details the director presents to him. They discuss Chase’s pampered childhood, which he attempts to bombastically inflate with tales of how he grew up “on the streets,” his burgeoning stand-up and musical career at college, and eventually, his discovery by Lorne Michaels, who cast him in the make-or-break first season of SNL.
They briefly discuss Chase’s several marriages and storied movie career, from the highs of Fletch to the lows of Nothing but Trouble. Anyone looking for in-depth behind-the-scenes stories of the making of these films will have to look elsewhere. Throughout all of it, friends of Chase like Martin Short, Goldie Hawn, and Lorne Michaels as well as co-stars like Johnny Galecki and even out-of-left-field guest interviewees like Ryan Reynolds and Kevin Smith, for some reason, show up to expound on Chase’s career, what made him so funny, and how it all went tits-up.
Because for some time, Chase really was at the top of the world. His films grossed over 2 billion dollars at the box office when adjusted for inflation, and he helped launch three juggernaut franchises — two of which, National Lampoon’s Vacation and Saturday Night Live, are still around today, and one of which, Fletch, kind of isn’t. But disappointingly, the documentary doesn’t spend much time on what Chase actually thinks of his own success because Zenovich is more interested in portraying him as a weak, bitter old man, far past his prime and perhaps burnt out from years of being a comic punching-bag for everyone from Dan Harmon on Community to the newer casts of SNL.
Chevy Chase Gets Off Easy
I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not really could have been one of two things: an unpretentious clipshow that lightly recaps Chase’s career and bundles together his funniest moments into a montage, or a serious editorial piece about how the mechanisms of Hollywood enabled an unpleasant, arrogant, and verbally abusive man to briefly become one of the biggest stars in the world. Instead, Zenovich commits to neither, resulting in a film that never shows you Chase at his best and shies away from exposing him at his worst.
On top of that, Zenovich seems to just not vibe with Chase at all. And that’s fine — not every documentarian has to like their subject — but the result is that there’s just no angle here. It’s one thing if the filmmaker clearly hates Chase’s work and wants to prod him and provoke some kind of reflection on his part, but the director doesn’t do that. Instead, we get a bunch of talking heads with an older Chase where Zenovich has no idea what to say, what to ask, or how to respond to him. She’s a truly terrible interviewer — there’s no give and take and no attempt to meet her subject halfway.
The one moment of genuine conflict comes when they’re discussing the gay SNL comedian Terry Sweeney and some off-color comments Chase made about him back in the ’80s. The director and her assistant read from Sweeney’s account to Chase, who immediately rebuffs the written account and calls Sweeney a liar. And that’s it. There’s no attempt to excavate what truly happened, zero curiosity on the filmmaker’s part, and they just let Chase respond and maintain a stiff upper lip. It’s terrible documentary filmmaking.
Conclusion
I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not is just the latest in a number of inarticulate, pointless documentaries about famous people that exist only to prop up the filmography of a star who isn’t as relevant now as they were several decades ago. The story of Chevy Chase, unfortunately for him, his agent, and his fans, seems to be mostly over, and all Zenovich’s documentary accomplishes is providing a lazily sketched outline of his career.
The sole interesting moment in the film, other than a ghastly shot of Chase playing the piano in bare feet, is an aside where Chase goes into a flower shop to buy something for his wife. The florist clearly knows Chase, and they briefly discuss flowers before he cons poor Chase into paying hundreds of dollars for a tiny bouquet. The scene is not noteworthy because the florist clearly scammed Chase out of a significant chunk of money, but rather because it is the only moment in the film in which we’re allowed to see Chase as a mortal man. It’s the sole scene in which he’s not completely “on.” Such moments of candor are the stuff that most documentarians chase for their whole careers, and Zenovich seems to have found one minute in a sea of desperate posturing in which Chevy Chase actually feels more like a human being and less like Chevy Chase.
I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not is now streaming on CNN and HBO Max.
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