The film has a wonderful cast, including a very funny Cheri Oteri (as Dee Johanssen, Dusty's ex-girlfriend), who has a great entrance. She enters Dusty's apartment, stomps around on the wood floor and begins removing her possessions while the documentary crew is filming. Right away you get a clear sense of her character.
The first laugh-out-loud moment for me comes only like two and a half minutes in. After Dusty loses his horse Sprockets to another trainer, he tells the documentary crew, "I don't have kids, but I imagine it's like saying goodbye to a child and letting them go live with another family, hopefully at a small profit." That's totally my kind of humor.
Martin Mull plays Ken Sanders, Dusty's father, who works delivering meals to the elderly. The company name? Last Supper. Details like that are wonderful, and where a lot of this film's laughs come from.
However, some of the jokes are obvious and fall flat. For example, when Ken Sanders says he had to act as both mother and father to Dusty and his sister, you of course expect some sort of cross-dressing joke to follow. And it does. And it's not that funny. And it's revisited later in the film. Also, the sequence with one of the horse owners suffers from the presence of his grandson, who clearly doesn't want to be there. And as if there were any question about it, the grandson then says, "I hate this place." It's not funny, and we already understood that by his demeanor. The line was overkill on something that wasn't clever to begin with.
Dusty goes to his high school reunion (class of 1990 - oh man, that's my year), which is held in the same building as a Star Trek convention, thus allowing for a nice cameo by LeVar Burton, who played Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation. At the class reunion, someone being interviewed remarks that Dusty must be successful to be the subject of a documentary, and the camera guy responds, "Not really. There's another crew following a winning trainer." That's a nice (and believable) touch, and puts everything into context.
It's at the high school reunion where he runs into his old teacher and her husband (two of the four who purchase the new racehorse). Do teachers attend their students' reunions? It seems odd to me, because wouldn't they then have to attend them all the time? But then again, I've never gone to a reunion, so who knows?
One of the best supporting performances is by Mo Collins as Tina McKay, the high-strung and tensely wound wife of Sebastian McKay (Peter Jacobson). I particularly enjoyed the scene where she applies pressure to the new jockey.
Cheri Oteri is also seriously funny. When being interviewed, she asks the questions: "Do you know if he's seeing anybody? I'll cut her." She gives that great intense and honest delivery. There are several scenes where her comic timing is impeccable. But we see Dee Johanssen at work, the point of which eludes me. It seems the documentary crew is tossing a wide net. There actually seems to be at least three crews following Dusty, because in one scene there is a camera on Dusty, one on his father, and one on Dee, all of whom are in different locations.
Kevin Nealon and Susan Yeagley are absolutely wonderful as a couple of taxidermists who specialize in pets. They're in only one scene, but it's one of my favorite scenes. I've always loved Kevin Nealon, and he gives a great serious, dry delivery when talking about filling a dead cat with pennies to use a door stopper. I would totally hire him, though he'd have to provide the cat.
The DVD bonus feature is deleted footage, and fortunately it's more than seven minutes featuring Martin Mull, Kevin Nealon and Susan Yeagley. It's all footage from that same restaurant scene, which is great, because that's precisely what I wanted more of.
And They're Off was written by Alan Grossbard, and directed by Rob Schiller. The DVD was released on May 1, 2012 through Screen Media Films.
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