**½/****
starring Grant Rosenmeyer, Paul Raci, Lucy DeVito, Maggie Grace
written by Jesse Orenshein
directed by H.P. Mendoza
by Walter Chaw Ben (Grant Rosenmeyer) isn’t doing very well. He writes children’s books with his wife (Reina Hardesty), but she just died of an allergic reaction; all those arguments they used to have seem so stupid now. H.P. Mendoza’s The Secret Art of Human Flight is about being grateful for what you have while you have it–which isn’t novel, you’ll agree. One night, while doom-scrolling through TikTok, Ben watches what appears to be footage of a guy killing himself but is, in fact, footage of a guy who has taught himself to fly, blasting off from the edge of a cliff. Why he needs to jump in order to fly is what I think liberal arts majors call a “metaphor.” Also a metaphor is how Ben gets on the Dark Web to buy the multi-step process through which he, too, might learn to fly. What he doesn’t know is his five grand is buying the personal attention of flight inventor Mealworm (Paul Raci), who, with a combination of unctuous Peter Coyote cult-leader charisma, puts Ben through his paces. It’s that kind of movie.
By that I mean, it’s a manifestation of aggressive quirk: a hip mishmash of disparate elements bound by twee like a package small festivals eagerly open but most other people want nothing to do with. It has a lot to overcome, and I liked it for how hard it works. I condescended to it, is what I mean to say, which is an unbecoming way to enjoy anything, I admit. The picture takes wild, insane swings at every pitch, whether or not it’s anywhere remotely near the plate, and when you’re putting everything into every ball, you only have to make contact once or twice. The Secret Art of Human Flight never takes itself very seriously, even when it’s having Ben find a secret video of his dead wife that makes him laugh at himself and put a lighter spin on everything he’s lost. Lucy DeVito has a pleasant maternal energy as Ben’s worried sister, while a pretty neighbor-lady, Wendy (Maggie Grace), drops by with a pie to present a brief possibility of this becoming one of those romantic grief movies before it’s clear she’s there to provide another inspirational story about how everyone deals with loss differently and that it’s okay to work through it at your own pace if you need to, hon. Take your time.
Rosenmeyer is good as a discount Steve Carell, Raci is in typically fine form, and I do appreciate the movie’s similarities to high-concept comedies like Burt Reynolds’s The End and Gregg Champion’s Short Time and Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life. Really, all of them at the same time. (Last Holiday, too.) What I didn’t like is an undercooked subplot involving one Detective Reyes (Rosa Arredondo), who suspects Ben of murdering his wife against every piece of evidence before her eyes and also a surveillance video she asks for early in the film but never follows up on apparently. She reappears a few times to create conflict but proves mostly to be a distraction and, disastrously, a mood killer. I didn’t need to spend any time wondering if this was one of those movies where the wife is a figment of the hero’s imagination or if he’s a murderer entering into a fantasyland to repress memories of his horrific misdeed. What I needed was more time spent with Mealworm getting Ben to humiliate himself, because Ben thinks it’s helping up until the point that it actually does help. The good news is that, as it stands, there’s just enough time.
