Under the Eiffel Tower

Archie Borders’ Under the Eiffel Tower is a functionally enjoyable film bookended by an opening and a conclusion both dogged by distrust in the audience’s reading comprehension. Excessive voiceovers spell out character motivations while listlessly establishing a plot so familiar it barely needs the set-up: Man loses his job. Man descends into funk. Man meets woman, falls in love, devotes himself to ascending said funk and winning her hand. Also, they’re in Paris. Fin.
Holding Under the Eiffel Tower’s sins against it, though, can be a half-hearted gesture. When the film actually works, it’s unexpectedly pleasant, “unexpectedly” because it gets off on the sourest foot possible, the “beset-upon white male” foot, with beleaguered Stuart (Matt Walsh) getting canned from a bourbon company in where else but Kentucky, unceremoniously and to his shocked outrage, as if there’s no possible, conceivable reason to let him go from a position he knows he’s sleepwalking through. If Borders, working off of a script from Judith Godrèche, means to comment on white guy entitlements, he instead gets dangerously close to endorsing them, offsetting that clarion call of macho privilege by making Stuart pathetic.
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Stuart reflects in voiceover, misquoting Thoreau by about an inch but honest enough to own up to it. He’s definitely desperate. First, he pickles his interiors with the sample products from his previous employer littering his apartment. Then, his friends (Michaela Watkins, David Wain) invite him along on a family vacation to la Ville des Lumières, where he briefly loses his mind and proposes to their 20-something daughter, Rosalind (Dylan Gelula). Then he befriends Scottish football player Liam (Reid Scott), and takes an impulsive road trip (train trip, really) to French wine country, which is mostly an excuse to flirt with Louise (Godrèche, not only the film’s scribe but also its co-lead), who happens to manage a local vineyard.