In the preview I saw for 'Second Best,' it was billed as a comedy. If this is comedy, Bergman must be a farceur. <br /><br />I'm in the 50ish age category that this film allegedly examines. If I had friends like the five characters on display here, I'd be looking for new friends. <br /><br />'Second Best' amounts to yet another dreary coming-of-age exercise done in reverse. (Is it my imagination, or is every third film about coming of age in one way or another?) The five are altogether unappealing caricatures of frantic men who have spent a lifetime apparently engaging in infantile, giggling, 100% sex-based conversations that make you want to smack them all up side the head. <br /><br />This film dragged on forever, yet it's only 86 minutes long (90 minutes with credits). It spends 10 minutes alone on a golf game to underscore the life-long jealousy between Boyd Gaines and Joe Pantoliano (who also served as this film's producer).<br /><br />Gaines plays a very successful Hollywood producer who reads 'bushels of scripts' every day. Elliot the Nebbish -- Pantoliano -- just happens to have a script. Enter a 'conflict' point in the film, and also enter a very big 'clunk' of disbelief for me: why would such an upwardly mobile, very ambitious guy, who escaped the tedious, dead-end life of a suburban Jerseyite, still consider the pathetic, terminally whiny Elliot his very best friend after all these years? Writer/director Weber tries to explain it in his dialogue, but it's a pretty hollow explanation.<br /><br />If indie films are to succeed, they have to overcome poor direction, pedestrian acting and, most conspicuously, lousy editing. With about 50 judicious snips, this film could have been slightly better. Again and again, the camera lingers awkwardly and self-consciously, as if it were looking for a place to go.<br /><br />I love Joe Pantoliano, but he sleep-walks through this film; it's one of those 'phone-in' performances. Bronson Pinchot gives us his 25 different definitions of 'smirk' (if this guy is a trauma surgeon in a hospital, patients beware). And boyish, churlish Boyd Gaines is a world-famous producer of Hollywood blockbusters? It just doesn't work.<br /><br />'Second Best' is not IN ANY WAY A COMEDY (except, perhaps, unintentionally). As a satire, it might have worked. Weber needed about 95 per cent more subtlety, irony and nuance, but he doesn't deliver. It's an earnest effort that falls flat. We are left with a dreary story about dreary characters who are difficult to care about. That's a recipe for cinematic failure, and maybe that's appropriate -- failure seems to be one of the film's principal motifs.