Fool’s Paradise is a Shaky, Charming Debut for Charlie Day

In an interview about Fool’s Paradise, actor and director Charlie Day expressed that he was eager to play a silent character. His instantly recognizable voice—a playful tenor which evokes a friendly Labrador when speaking and can rise to a shrill Eldritch screech at its most played-up—came to define the seminal, rat-bashing character he plays on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the profoundly vulgar and immensely popular FX sitcom that he created and writes for alongside his friends and co-stars Glenn Howerton and Rob McElhenney. His voice helped bring him his first mainstream success as squeaky Dale Arbus in 2011’s Horrible Bosses, and has come to mark much of his Hollywood career—recently, he’s lent his unique voice to Luigi for The Super Mario Bros. Movie. 

It therefore makes sense that for his feature directorial debut, Day would write for himself a role that he’s always wanted to play, a role that he knew no one would otherwise bring to him. Of course he would be keen to take on the challenge of, for once, simply being silent. Fool’s Paradise (which shares a name with a silent-era Cecil B. DeMille film) also draws on Day’s clear cinematic inspirations, in part revealed by a recent trip to the Criterion Closet. There is a direct throughline between Day’s silent, mugging Latte Pronto and Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. And Fool’s Paradise is an obvious rephrasing of Hal Ashby’s Being There: Peter Sellers’ Chance, a simple-minded gardener kicked to the curb after his wealthy employer dies, is, by chance, picked off the street by a mogul assuming him to be another member of the elite and is accidentally shepherded into high society.

Fool’s Paradise doesn’t come close to clearing the self-imposed hurdle of matching a Chaplin classic or an Ashby satire. But it does sometimes work as a breezy comedy and a satire-lite of vacuous Hollywood, articulated tenfold by the modern Superhero Franchise Industrial Complex. Our Tramp surrogate, an as-yet-unnamed Latte Pronto (Day), is an anonymous, committed mental patient with the brain of a child and an inability, or reluctance, to talk. But since the state is unwilling to pay for any recovery, the patient is kicked to the curb, where he ambles passively through the Los Angeles city streets getting into various shenanigans until he stumbles upon a man known only to us as The Producer (Ray Liotta). 

The Producer has a stubborn, English method actor named Thomas Bingsley (also Day) on his hands who refuses to leave his trailer to shoot a film, and who also happens to be the dead ringer for the strange, silent little man holding bags of oranges outside The Producer’s car window. So, in a last-ditch effort to save the scene, The Producer enlists the mental patient to replace Thomas. It’s here that the patient acquires the name Latte Pronto, after the comically arduous shoot wraps and The Producer calls on someone to bring him his coffee drink quickly. Struggling, motor-mouthed publicist Lenny (Ken Jeong)–mishearing, perhaps intentionally–foists the moniker upon Latte. Lenny is looking for the “next big thing” to revive his career, and he sees that in Latte, whose inability to not look at the camera while shooting becomes a revered fourth wall-breaking “quirk” of his acting “technique.” Partnering with Lenny is the first domino to fall in Latte’s inadvertent ascent to movie stardom, which cascades after Bingsley commits accidental suicide and Latte is forced to finish the film.

It’s difficult to see die-hard Sunny fans not enjoying Fool’s Paradise—like myself along with, seemingly, the majority of my Thursday evening premiere screening, which was in stitches for most of the runtime and hooted joyously at every appearance of a Sunny actor. The film indulges in similar irreverent, sneaky throwaway gags and allows Day to utilize more of his winsome physicality, spending much of the film mugging in a way that’s just sort of funny by virtue of it being Charlie Day. It doesn’t lean into the laugh-a-minute nature that many may have come to expect from a sitcom co-creator, nor does it embrace the extremes of that same irreverence (not that that was Day’s intention), but I still found it consistently funny. There are also some gorgeous compositions shot by DP Nico Aguilar; the film is noticeably better-looking than most mainstream comedies, and avoids the Gray Soup of Despair.