I might be going out on a limb here, but I bet the star of
The Pitch, Peter Houghton, used to jump around his bedroom playing a tennis
racquet like he was Bruce Springsteen. And I don’t mean when he was a teenager,
I mean last week.
Taking on the part of a struggling screenwriter in the
throes of a last-minute re-write before pitching his latest blockbuster to a
bunch of disinterested movie bigwigs, Houghton doesn’t just tell the story, he
lives it.
Everything, from opening credits to sound effects, to mis-en-scene and
incidental music, the entire movie experience is channelled through this one
man. Accents, impersonations, even a neat interplay between fictional and
real-life narratives are all handled with an exuberance that makes you feel
almost knackered yourself at the end of it. And OK, the narrative of the movie
might be a little too action-packed at times, and his Clint Eastwood takes on
shades of Jack Nicholson on a couple of occasions, but he carries it all
along on the crest of one relentlessly manic wave.
Strangely, given the rigid conventions that infect
screenplay-writing, The Pitch suggests there are only four stories in the world
rather than the usual seven. On this showing, though, add another three and we’d
be calling for a defibrillator. Worth the ticket price for his Robert de Niro
alone.