Stream It or Skip It?

I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not (now streaming on CNN) quickly reveals itself to be the most fascinating documentary among the recent glut of celebrity profiles. In its introductory montage, the word “asshole” is volleyed around like, well, a cold potato. That’s just Chase’s persona, of course. Or is it his true personality? That such a question so immediately presents itself indicates that director Marina Zenovich’s doc, unlike so many other films of its ilk, is no hagiographic exercise bearing a stamp of approval from its subject. And as we watch, it’s increasingly clear that Zenovich’s attempt to pierce Chase’s mystique instead of just playing along with it is the only way to make this project worthy of her efforts, and our time.

The Gist: After the intro – where an assemblage of talking heads speaks on the mischievous glint in Chase’s eye, his balance of being talented and “dangerous,” his being “the asshole who you love” – Zenovich tells Chase that she wants to figure him out. His reply? It ain’t gonna happen. He proclaims himself to be deep and complex. Then he tells Zenovich flat out, “You’re not bright enough.” Ouch? Maybe. Later in the film, a commentator will say that Chase used to insult people with a manner that implied being in on the joke, that he was simply Chevy Chase, The Asshole You Love, but nowadays, it comes off more mean-spirited (whether that indicates a changing of the times or a change in the man and his tone is up for interpretation; it’s most likely both). Either way, Chase’s assessment of the director sure doesn’t sound like a joke. But it opens the door for Zenovich to Get Into It, and Get Into It, she does.

But before that happens, she sets the stage with the basics of Chase’s biography. He’s a New York City native. His peers called him a “buffoon” with a gift for physical comedy. He once played drums in a band that would become Steely Dan after he quit. He gallivanted around New York, living in cruddy apartments and piecing together gigs as a comedy writer. He joined off-Broadway sketch comedy group National Lampoon’s Lemmings, and by 1975, was a ground-floor writer of the new TV show Saturday Night Live, where he eventually became the seventh member of what was intended to be a six-person cast. There, his pancake-flat delivery and blatantly arrogant persona helped define what would become a platform for cutting-edge comedy. And then we see current-day Chase sitting at a table, being instructed by Zenovich to not look directly into the camera, and he retorts that he created the TV-news-spoof sketch Weekend Update specifically so he could look directly into the camera. (Note that the title of this doc stems from Chase’s famously arrogant Weekend Update intro.)

He’d leave SNL after about a year, relocating to Los Angeles, thus spurring a montage of clips from his string of hit movies: Foul Play, Caddyshack, Modern Problems, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Fletch, Christmas Vacation. You know them, I’m sure. His family members and peers talk more about his cocaine addiction in the ’80s than he does. Eventually, we get to Chase’s clash with SNL cast member Terry Sweeney, then the only openly gay actor on TV – during a guest-hosting stint on the show in 1985, Chase suggested doing a sketch about regularly weighing an AIDS patient, and Sweeney was rightly offended; Chase today calls Sweeney a liar for saying Chase was angry about being forced to apologize. Then we get to Chase’s 2000s/2010s stint on the sitcom Community, where he allegedly used the N-word, infuriating co-star Yvette Nicole Brown. There’s some dancing around what he said and in what context, followed by a revelation that Chase suffered memory loss after experiencing heart failure in 2021, during which he was placed in a coma for eight days. Can we trust everything the now 82-year-old Chase says in this documentary? Not sure. But have we ever been able to trust what he says?  

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The 2020 documentary Belushi comes to mind, although it’s easier to wrangle an enigma after he’s been dead for a while. Otherwise, Zenovich has a history of making docs about difficult famous people: Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and its follow-up Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out, Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic and Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, and Lance Armstrong two-parter Lance.

Performance Worth Watching: It would be disingenuous to say that Chase isn’t the most compelling person in most any room.

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: There is so much Chevyness to wrangle here, the film doesn’t even mention the infamous SNL fistfight between Chase and Bill Murray. Anyway: Sincerity is not what makes Chevy Chase Chevy Chase: His current response to the Sweeney incident is, “Is he still alive?” (He does seem legitimately upset for not being a bigger part of SNL 50, though.) So any frustration we may feel as Zenovich tries, mostly unsuccessfully, to “figure him out” likely stems from the friction between Chase’s desire to maintain some mystique as a public figure, and any yearning we may have for him to be an open book and wear emotions on his sleeve, especially in the current era, when people turn their Instagram accounts into confessional diaries. 

The director’s inability to go deeper or draw out satisfying explanations for his behavior is fully on Chase, who’s elusive, unwilling and, possibly due to his memory loss, unable to do so. When Zenovich asks him about the abuse he suffered as a child, via his mother and stepfather, Chase’s “reply” is to pantomime slapping a fly and pretending to eat it. 

So perhaps looking for “answers” is the wrong way to approach I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not. The doc is eminently watchable and absorbing, and Zenovich lets the facts sit out in the open without judgment or justification. More fascinating is how it sits with us: Speaking as someone who grew up on Fletch and Caddyshack and SNL, and who watches Christmas Vacation with religious fervor every December, you’re forced to reckon with the fact that Chase being a raging asshole might be what made him so funny, that sometimes, the best artists put a lot of themselves into their work.

It’s important to remember that he’s from the Just Be Funny school of unvarnished, no-boundaries comedy – cue the SNL sketch in which he and Richard Pryor fling racial epithets at each other – although the film doesn’t get into the potentially thorny who-what-why-when politics of what’s funny and what’s offensive. Chase’s brilliance as a comic lies in his ability to be an arrogant jackass and then immediately stumble down the steps and humiliate himself. We can shake our heads disapprovingly at the Sweeney controversy (he and Brown recently offered pre-emptive commentary on this documentary, and it’s far from complimentary) and love Clark Griswold. As ever, both things can be true. 

Which isn’t to say I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not is always hard-hitting journalism. We’re frequently reminded of the joy he brings people – Zenovich follows him to restaurants and a florist, where he happily greets admirers, and to one of many annual Q&A screenings of Christmas Vacation, where he’s the object of much adoration. And few people in history can be the subject of such an extensive falling-off-ladders supercut. Chase’s assertion that he’s deep and complex ends up being Zenovich’s thesis statement, as people of depth and complexity are rarely easily summed up in 90-ish minutes of a documentary. At the film’s conclusion, Chase apologizes to the director. “For what?” she asks. “Just for being who I am,” he replies. And maybe he’s being serious. Maybe.

Our Call: FASCINATING. All caps necessary. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.