Seriously Red Compellingly Explores the Strange, Tacky World of Professional Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers Impersonators
THIS is what I did instead of watching the Super Bowl
Fourteen years ago, I walked into my editor’s office at The A.V. Club and told him that even though I wrote almost exclusively about Hip Hop for the site’s music section I had become fascinated by country music and would like to do an ambitious, exhaustive series where I immersed myself in the genre, ending with a sacred pilgrimage to Nashville.
He was surprised by my words and my idea but said yes. Looking back it’s hard to believe that it all could have gone down so quickly and easily but then 2009 was a very different time than today. I can’t imagine being employed by any website or newspaper at this point.
I don’t want to brag, but over the course of my twenty-six years in the business I went from being precociously successful to being unemployable and unpublishable at a period in my life when I would benefit most from an employer and a publisher, when I have two children and a mountain of credit card debt and an income that’s forever sinking to horrifying new lows.
But I also can’t imagine a popular website like The A.V. Club saying yes to an idea that’s so weird and unique and almost perversely non-commercial.
When I think about Nashville or Bust I start to miss elements of my old life. I came to have very complicated, painful feelings about my time at The A.V. Club, as well as my stint at The Dissolve, but I yearn sometimes for the audience I once had as well as the freedom that I felt before things inevitably took a turn.
One of the goals of my Nashville or Bust column for The A.V. Club was to expand my frame of reference by learning a great deal about a fascinating and essential element of American music and American pop culture. At the very least, I figured that I’d be able to write some terrific obituaries when ancient country icons like Tom T. Hall finally kicked off their mortal coil.
Studying country music for two long, joyful years should be excellent preparation for reviewing the new Australian dramedy Seriously Red, which is about an under-achieving fuck-up who both finds herself and loses herself in a sparkling new identity as a Dolly Parton impersonator.
But Seriously Red honestly and convincingly portrays Parton as a superstar whose extraordinary appeal and charm transcends country music. It unwittingly highlights the absurdity of people complaining about Parton being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by arguing persuasively that Dolly belongs to EVERYBODY.
Dolly is country. She’s pop. She’s rock and roll. She’s bluegrass. She’s gospel. She’s camp. She’s dazzlingly sincere. She’s whatever the hell she wants to be and more. Dolly is one of our nation’s preeminent goodwill ambassador but her popularity transcends the country that she embodies, as evidenced by Seriously Red being set a world away from the American South yet Parton-themed all the same.
Emotionally stunted protagonist Red (Crew Boylan, who also wrote the screenplay) is introduced at an office party where she wows coworkers by singing “9 to 5” in full costume as Dolly Parton and bantering bawdily as the beloved sexpot. She makes a much different impression on her boss and professional colleagues by indiscriminately grabbing the crotches of men and women immediately afterwards.
MeToo is referenced in Red’s firing but the film clearly sees the genitalia groping as relatively harmless drunken shenanigans and not a moral and/or legal crime. Red’s inebriated sexual harassment spree sets a baseline of irresponsibility and bad behavior for the character. It’s a way of establishing that while Red may begin the movie the kind of lunatic who thinks nothing of getting wasted and following Donald Trump’s advice as to how stars can and should greet beautiful women but by the end she has experienced so much emotional and spiritual growth that she wouldn’t even THINK of doing something like that.
Red loses her day job but picks up an exhilarating new hustle when people who make their living managing celebrity impersonators take a shine to her and line up paying work as a professional Dolly Parton impersonator.
Our anti-heroine is a shambling train wreck of a human being who lives in the garage of her cruel and narcissistic mother and leaps into bed with any man or woman who shows interest, including an Elvis Presley impersonator played by Rose Byrne.
Byrne intriguingly if confusingly plays the King of Rock and Roll as a sexy woman who sounds like she perpetually has a mouth full of crunchy peanut butter. It’s an initially promising role and performance but the character disappears for a solid hour and when she reappears it’s wildly anti-climactic.
Byrne’s gender-bending Elvis specifically wants to have sex with a fantasy version of Dolly Parton, not a recently laid off office worker with a messy personal and professional life. She’s not alone. As Dolly Parton, Red makes people happy when she can’t help disappointing everyone who even tolerates her as herself.
Red’s career as an Aussie Dolly Parton gets a huge boost when she’s teamed with Kenny (Daniel Webber), a pathologically committed performer who is apparently the top Kenny Rogers impersonator in Australia, if not the world.
I expected Seriously Red to make sadistic satirical sport of Kenny. I thought he would be portrayed as a deluded wannabe but also a womanizer and a creep. While the film does enjoy some laughs at the character’s expense he’s portrayed in a shockingly empathetic manner.
Every time Red performs, it’s with the explicit understanding that she is at best an acceptable, even convincing and persuasive substitute for a real person who is still touring and making music and headlines. That’s not true for Kenny.
Kenny Rogers is an infinitely lesser artist to begin with. He was a charismatic cheeseball with a marvelous beard and an appealing shtick whereas Parton is legitimately one of the greatest songwriters, singers and storytellers of the past hundred years.
Because Kenny does not have to compete with the real Kenny Rogers, he has deluded himself into thinking that, on a very real level, he IS Kenny Rogers. It’s easy to see why he might feel that way. He looks like a MUCH shorter version of Rogers, albeit with a distractingly lycanthrope face. He performs Kenny Rogers’ music with a double for his most popular collaborator. He even shares the same name as his idol.
It would be easy to make Kenny a joke and a phony but Seriously Red depicts him instead as a true believer who would rather live a fundamentally sad, strange life as a fake Kenny Rogers than be himself.
There’s something deeply poignant about Kenny’s delusions. Seriously Red is much more compelling as an affectionate exploration of the weird world of professional celebrity impersonators than as a feel good comedy about an oddball outsider coming of age deep into her thirties.
Bobby Canavale, who is married to Byrne in real life, has a memorable supporting turn as a Neil Diamond impersonator who traded in performing for managing other impersonators yet still hungers for a taste of his trade’s sad spotlight.
Seriously, Red makes a big jump into psychodrama with a climax that feels like it belongs in a much different, much darker movie, specifically Robert Altman’s timeless masterpiece Nashville. The boldness and audacity of the film’s big finish do not feel earned.
I spent a little over sixteen dollars for a ticket to see Seriously Red, then paid an additional thirty or forty dollars for Lyft rides to the theater. As if that weren’t bad enough, one of the theaters I went to was closed but thankfully there was another showing the movie five minutes away.
So you can only imagine how stupid I felt when I was looking on my Roku box for movies about movies to write about for my upcoming book The Fractured Mirror and saw that I could stream it at home for 9.99.
D’oh! Oh well. This return to movie reviewing is in large part about embracing the theatrical experience in all its expense and aggravation and there’s something pleasingly perverse in devoting the night of Super Bowl Sunday to being the only person in the theater for a character study about a Kenny Rogers impersonator unwilling and unable to separate his personal life from his private life.
I’m planning on giving movies grades now. I might as well start here. I would give the drama and comedy of Seriously Red a C+ and its wall-to wall Dolly Parton music an A for a final grade of B-. It’s very much not worth venturing to the theaters to see but it’s a more than agreeable time-waster, particularly if, like me, you REALLY love country music.
This sounds absolutely fascinating!!!
Not going to read full essay till my wife and I get to see it.
I read the intro and knew this was a film for us.