Ricky Gervais Revives His ‘Office’ Character: A Bad Idea
I can’t think of another example of a TV star who has managed to mar the fond memory of a brilliant creation as thoroughly as Ricky Gervais has done with The Office. That 2001 series about the cluelessly insufferable office worker David Brent, co-created by Gervais and Stephen Merchant, was startlingly original and laugh-out-loud funny. It secured Gervais’s fame, which he has spent the intervening years eroding up to the present day; by now, the sight of him smirking through a Golden Globes hosting gig is enough to make me change the channel.
Gervais’s post-Office projects have been extremely uneven — though I kind of liked Extras. I never thought Gervais’s pride would allow him to slink back to reviving the Brent character, but here we are with David Brent: Life on the Road, a feature film released theatrically overseas but making its premiere in America on Netflix starting Friday.
Related: 5 Episodes of The Office to Binge Before Watching Life on the Road
Life on the Road picks up Brent years after The Office, which you’ll recall was framed as a documentary about the character. Brent now concedes this may have made a mistake, because we see that he is treated as a joke by the people who remember him as a docu-star, and as a cipher by even more people who’ve forgotten his brief moment of fame. But Brent continues to pursue a dream we remember he’s long had — to be a rock star. Life is once again positioned as a documentary, one that follows Brent on his latest sad quest.
Life on the Road wants to give you some idea of how tedious it is to be a touring musician, and how tedious it is to be a musician stuck accompanying a boor like Brent. The film — written and directed by Gervais — achieves this all too well. The hour-and-a-half-plus seems twice as long, with Brent being constantly humiliated while grinning pathetically. Of course he’s a terrible musician, a terrible singer-songwriter, and a perfectly awful performer. Of course the musicians he’s hired ridicule him behind his back and think he’s a jerk.
Gervais also tries to extend his reputation as a bad-taste rebel by having Brent deliver lines that ridicule black people, overweight people, Chinese people, special-needs people — the list goes on and on. It doesn’t seem possible to laugh at Brent being oblivious to his own offensiveness. You can understand what Gervais was trying to do here — to deepen the Brent character, to add layers to his regrettable life. But the original Office did all that already — it remains a superb piece of work, one that Gervais has never managed to equal.
David Brent: Life on the Road is streaming now on Netflix.
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