On 'Derek' by Ricky Gervais
It was a different time in Ricky Gervais's career.
May 2012: it was a moment in his arc, coming after The Office, his UK series, and toward the end of the run of the US version, a moment after Extras, but in many ways in between what was and what would be the next chapter in his story.
The writer, the actor, the comedian — a welcome face in family-focused big-screen stuff, and a polarizing presence as host of the Golden Globe Awards — what I was waiting for from Gervais was something as stunningly funny and uncomfortable as the fifteen-episode run of David Brent's story at Wernham Hogg in Slough.
So, we got Derek.
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The NY Shorts Fest screened what was then a pilot for what would become a two-year program on Channel 4 in the UK. We gathered at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema, down in the Lower East Side, on May 29, 2012. Already cablecast by that time, in the UK, viewers in the States had not gotten a full shot at the short film apart from showings such as this one.
What follows is my review of the work, first published on my old website’s blog, back in 2012. At some point after it appeared, my blog disappeared (except for on the Wayback Machine), and so this piece has not been around for some time. Here, it gets a new home and perhaps republishing it will prompt a fresh look at Derek, about which not enough has been written in the right way. I have lightly edited the piece for grammar and a few poorly chosen words, but it is otherwise unaltered.
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Anybody who's suggested that Ricky Gervais' Derek is about a person with mental challenges is a fucking head case. Some viewers have slammed the writer-director's new short film, saying that it exploits people with learning disabilities. Pure and utter bullshit. Case closed. No, we're not arguing about this. We're not here to discuss the crackpot decision that a fictional character, about whom we've been given no information other than what is on the screen, has or does not have learning disabilities. More importantly, Gervais's new work is not about that.
Here are the basics, for those who care about the plot: the title character, played by Gervais — more on this in a moment — cares for old people in an assisted living home. Derek loves his job. He loves the residents with whom he works. He loves Hannah, his facility's director. And they all love him. But sometimes bad things happen, and Derek is deeply moved when they take away the people he loves. And sometimes good things happen, and Derek seems to worry that these things will also take away the people that he loves.
Exploitation? Learning disabilities? Two million viewers in the UK: I suppose some morons had to turn on the telly.
What Derek is about is kindness. It's about a compassionate, ethical, morally intact man whose empathy is not only his great gift but also his Achilles' heel. If you're looking to psychoanalyze, psychologize, or in any way come up with some analysis or interpretation of these characters' supposed pathologies, then you've missed everything important about the piece. Every single thing.
Even the genuinely dim, however, will not miss the fact that Gervais' performance is remarkable. The actor has completely transformed himself; nowhere evident is the unflappable David-Brent type persona on which he's been riffing (at least partially) since his UK version of The Office in the early 2000s. In Derek, Gervais has somehow swallowed himself, shrinking his frame into this small and unassuming fellow. Shuffling along, his lower jaw forever locked out past his upper row, the character is at once tiny but huge — you can't look away from the mystery that he embodies. Importantly, from his combover to the nervous generosity that his twitchy little self seems to radiate, Derek is no more Gervais than Vito Corleone was Marlon Brando. Not to go too far into this, here, but there's an interesting comparison to explore between Brando and Robert DeNiro in the Corleone role, and Gervais' work with the Brent-type part and that of Derek, because all three, Brando and DeNiro and Gervais, can fall prey to similar self-aware tendencies when it comes to their onscreen appearances. Point is, however, Gervais’s Derek is wholly possessed of the gravity of a significant role undertaken by just the right actor.
The only way that the film flags, if it is too soft in one place at all, is in reliance upon the works of Erik Satie. The composer's piano pieces nudge Derek's already urgent sentimentality right up to the line, and it's perhaps necessary to look another time to determine whether Gervais has made a textural misstep in including such recognizable thread of sound as the backdrop (or sometimes the aural foreground) for the action. It might have been better to stick Gymnopedie in the credits, where it could serve to give the kind of post-episode coda that "Handbags and Gladrags" provided at the end of The Office (UK).
But as a whole work, Derek represents a milestone along Gervais' creative path. And whether he makes more of these and produces a series or not, the short stands as something significant.
In a sense, Gervais has made the future harder for himself. This is his Woody Allen moment, when he shifts from (say) what has been his Bananas and Sleeper era to something more profound, stranger, darker — his Annie Hall or something like it. Whatever now follows in Gervais' career, it will likely be measured against Derek, because at present Derek is his frontiersman's achievement.