If you asked Ricky Gervais to explain the backlash against him, you can imagine him telling you it’s us who have changed, not him. In today’s culture of safe spaces and preferred pronouns, his brand of caustic wit is no longer acceptable, and won’t be until we all regain the sense of humour we had in 2001, when The Office first went out. It’s a neat story, but as his new Netflix vehicle Special Correspondents makes clear, Gervais is far from the man he was 15 years ago.
Take the film’s opening minute, in which gruff US comedian Jim Norton cameos as an absurdly camp male prostitute eager to offer radio journalist Frank Bonneville (Eric Bana) a “freebie”. Norton’s presence is symptomatic of exactly the kind of showbiz insiderism that The Office – with its cast of unknowns – kicked against, while his character is a broad gay stereotype of precisely the type Gervais parodied in Extras.
Further cliches abound once Bonneville is tasked with reporting on a rebel uprising in Quito alongside sound engineer Ian Finch (Gervais). The pair lose their passports and wind up stuck in New York, where they elect to falsify their coverage from a room above a Spanish restaurant. Hijinks ensue, and our heroes eventually do find themselves in Ecuador (though fittingly the production never left north America) for a climactic action sequence that easily ranks among 2016’s funniest.
Hold on to that thought, because the film’s opening third is no easy ride. “I’ve never done anything extraordinary,” says Finch in one of several brazen acts of self-exposition, “I think that’s why I play video games, ’cos they’re more interesting than my real life.” The words ring especially hollow when spoken by Gervais, whose limited emotional range and rising celebrity profile have transformed him into a sort of modern-day Hugh Grant (stay with me) whose audience appeal is apparently so unimpeachable that his flat presence – much less his incongruous Englishness – is considered no obstacle.
Then again, Special Correspondents is ultimately less a character piece and more a message movie, thanks to a narrative shift that refocuses the film’s attention on the evils of contemporary slacktivism (a bete noire for Gervais). As about-turns go, it’s every bit as tedious as the bait-and-switch atheist polemic that found its way into the final act of The Invention Of Lying, or the anti-celebrity diatribe that wrapped up the Extras Christmas special. Maybe Gervais hasn’t changed that much after all.
