Arguably the best scene in Shane Black's new movie, The Nice Guys, takes place in a bowling-alley bathroom, where Ryan Gosling's private detective/bedraggled coward, Holland March, has decided to both relieve himself and read up on the paranoid presidency of Richard Nixon. Russell Crowe’s fellow muscle-for-hire character confronts him in the stall. So, holding a magazine with Nixon’s jowly face over his junk, March tries to wave his gun around. Instead, he drops a lit cigarette into his lowered pants and has a tiff with the stall door.
Mark it: This May, in the year 2016, Ryan Gosling is funny. And in this role in particular, Gosling unleashes a glass-shattering cacophony of squeals and screams and pants onto the world, and the world is better for it.
As the taciturn stoic in Drive, he used his scruff to command an audience. In dramas like Blue Valentine, he based his performance in withholding emotions and foregrounding his jawline. In Crazy Stupid Love, he lightened up his allure with a bit of comedy, but this mostly involved posing with his Photoshopped abs. If those versions of Ryan Gosling had the whole room swooning, the Nice Guys version of Ryan Gosling has stubbed his toe in the doorway before he's even gotten into the room.
In fact, in The Nice Guys, it seems Gosling has always just stubbed his toe. He is both in pain and aware his pain is ridiculous. And with this pain comes some incredible, strangled vocal control.
He speaks with the tone of an especially foolish bird. For example, in the script, Holland March is supposed to say the word “shit.” This can go a variety of ways, but the way Gosling chooses is to scream it to the heavens with the pitch of a panicking dorm RA with adenoid problems. In another line (“She’s dead"), he could have the cigar-smoky seriousness of a hard-boiled fedora hat stand. No. He uses the high-pitched squall of an asthmatic weasel.
Even in his language, Gosling's Nice Guys character is absurd. When he quickly squeals on a client, he says he “made a discretionary revelation.” This attempt to justify is entirely counteracted by Gosling’s physicality with it: cowering, on the floor, throwing up his fists like he's just realized he could try to protect himself.
In The Nice Guys, there is not a plan that isn’t bungled. There is not a thrown item that actually gets caught. The funniest part is not just that he’s clumsy, it’s that he's continually surprised he’s clumsy. He believes he’s suave. He can barely put sunglasses on without looking like a dummy. It’s not the time for high-fives, but if they were given, he would miss them. As Shane Black has described his performance, it’s “the comedy of lameness.” It's the comedy of trying to be chill, but being inept and incompetent.
But there's joy in all this lameness. He thinks he’s invincible. Instead, he’s a fool, protected by the world around him. It’s only through his drunken helplessness that he makes a discovery, and the most helpful thing he does in the entire movie is fall off of a well-placed wall. And The Nice Guys wants that to be the message: Revelation will come to those who fall into it.