For a tv movie, this film looks good. For an accurate biographic film, it fails miserably. For anything honoring the great one, it falls short. There are some good points. Lets start with this-
Brad Garrett is magnificent in the great ones role. He does make Gleason's stage presence feel like Gleason is larger than life. The trouble is with a script which falls short of letting Garrett really show what he can do.
Of course, in real life Gareett was Art Carney to Raymond Ramano. Here he takes the lead well, which is something Art Carney proved he could do too. Luckily the actor with Art's role did not do that many scenes because Carney was a bigger piece of Gleasons success than is shown here.
The shame here is Gleason is so much more of a person than this script allows him to be. I guess the reason is a tv movie just does not have time to do it right. It's too bad as Garrett's great job is sort of wasted by a narrow script. Bang, Zoom, Pow, there's a lot of Gleason not here. What little is here is a pleasure, but does not compare with the real work done by the great one.
Brad Garrett is magnificent in the great ones role. He does make Gleason's stage presence feel like Gleason is larger than life. The trouble is with a script which falls short of letting Garrett really show what he can do.
Of course, in real life Gareett was Art Carney to Raymond Ramano. Here he takes the lead well, which is something Art Carney proved he could do too. Luckily the actor with Art's role did not do that many scenes because Carney was a bigger piece of Gleasons success than is shown here.
The shame here is Gleason is so much more of a person than this script allows him to be. I guess the reason is a tv movie just does not have time to do it right. It's too bad as Garrett's great job is sort of wasted by a narrow script. Bang, Zoom, Pow, there's a lot of Gleason not here. What little is here is a pleasure, but does not compare with the real work done by the great one.