Sarah Silverman made the podcast rounds a while back to talk up The Bedwetter, her bestselling memoir, and Peep World, an ensemble comedy-drama in which she co-starred. The latter project radiated promise. Beyond a cast that included Michael C. Hall, Rainn Wilson, Judy Greer, Ron Rifkin, Taraji P. Henson, Ben Schwartz (Jean-Ralphio on Parks And Recreation), Kate Mara, Alicia Witt, Lesley Ann Warren, and Stephen Tobolowsky, Peep World promised a much-buzzed-about Silverman nude scene, which seems to have ended up on the cutting-room floor. Comedy geeks had ample cause to anticipate a Peep World theatrical release, but it never arrived. Instead of being Silverman’s coming-out party as a dramatic actor, Peep World became a direct-to-DVD footnote in her otherwise-impressive career.
Schwartz leads an overstuffed cast as a narcissistic young author who made his reputation and his fortune with a thinly veiled autobiographical novel that spilled his family’s ugly secrets, most notably the promiscuity of his sister, Silverman. As Schwartz, Silverman, and siblings Wilson (a loser lawyer engaged to Henson) and Hall (an underachieving architect) prepare for the 70th birthday party of towering patriarch Rifkin, they’re forced to confront their complicated, conflicted feelings about one another, and especially their father.
Peep World opens with Lewis Black’s smartass eye-of-God narration, which can’t help but recall Ricky Jay’s narration in Magnolia and Alec Baldwin’s voiceover work in The Royal Tenenbaums. Those films may have influenced Peep World, in the sense that it rips them off constantly. The homage is intentional, but it only highlights the yawning gap in quality between those films and Barry Blaustein’s facile explorations of independent-film-world quirks. Peep World inevitably builds to an overwrought yet strangely emotionally satisfying climactic final confrontation where Rifkin bares his fangs and reveals the full extent of his ugliness. Yet Peep World is strongest in its quieter scenes. The subtle moments work better than big speeches or awkward slapstick, like a painful (for all the wrong reasons) setpiece where Schwartz tries to do a bookstore reading with a raging boner. Peep World aspires to be a J.D. Salinger-like chronicle of a remarkable family’s angst; instead, it feels like a Sundance-approved mediocrity that cycles a lot of famous faces through an overly familiar gauntlet of conflicts and crises.
Key features: Deleted scenes.