Best Sellers: Michael Caine and Aubrey Plaza do just enough in predictable drama

He cited his age, his spine, a lack of roles and his burgeoning career as a writer.

Within days, Caine retracted the suggestion he was calling it quits (maybe Christopher Nolan will write Caine a role in his upcoming Oppenheimer film). If nothing else, the backflip at least gives audiences hope that Caine isn’t going to end his near-seven decade-long career with the middling American drama.

Best Sellers is a thin, mostly forgettable and inoffensive movie with two amenable leads in Caine and Aubrey Plaza, but it’s not worthy of being Caine’s capstone.

When Robert Redford retired (more or less, he later declared “you never know”) his final role was in David Lowery’s melancholic, low-key heist movie The Old Man and the Gun, which weaponised Redford’s devil-may-care easy charm as a serial bank robber.

That’s the kind of role Caine should get to go out on, something that was tailored for his talents. His role in Best Sellers could’ve been played by a dozen others.

If Best Sellers, directed by Lina Roessler, doesn’t have to carry the burden as Caine’s final role, then it’s a mildly amusing drama that is punctuated with occasional moments of poignancy and grumpy humour.

Caine plays Harris Shaw, an author who wrote one award-winning novel 40 years earlier and has since been a cantankerous, hard-drinking recluse who’s prone to throwing his ringing rotary phone out the window with one hand while his other holds his cigar.

In New York, Lucy (Plaza) is staring down the barrel of scathing reviews and negligible sales for the latest young adult book released by the publishing house she inherited from her father. She feels inadequate in the shadow of his literary legacy.

Desperate for a hit to stave off a sale to the vulturous Jack (Scott Speedman), Lucy and her assistant Rachel (Ellen Wong) discover a decades-old contract with Harris, one which stipulates he owes them a book for the $25,000 advance he was previously paid.

Lucy forces Harris to honour his contract and he gives them a manuscript with the condition that he’ll go on the book tour if no one edits his book.

But a book tour with an unwilling participant, even a Pulitzer Prize winning one, is hard work – driving him from bar-to-bar to crowds of ironic hipsters who come for the social posts and not the printed word.

The conflict between the two leads to some surprising emotional revelations and – expectedly – Lucy and Harris’s relationships starts to thaw, as they come to understand each other’s pain.

Best Sellers is a lightweight, predictable drama that telegraphs its contrived story beats, but Plaza and Caine do just enough to turn two unlikeable, prickly characters into ones you can stick with for a couple of hours.

Rating: 3/5

Best Sellers is in cinemas now

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Originally published as Best Sellers: Michael Caine and Aubrey Plaza do just enough in predictable drama