I’m not really sure what I think about Certifiably Jonathan.

There’s things I like about it. It’s genuinely funny in parts, and Jonathan Winters is certainly interesting enough to warrant being the subject of a film. But something’s off about it.

At the World of Comedy Film Festival this weekend on the University of Toronto campus, the “Canadian Premiere” of Certifiably Jonathan was the centrepiece of the fest’s Saturday lineup. In the afternoon we took in one of the many short films programs the fest was putting on. Without going into detail, the best ones we saw were “I Saw Her First,” “How Much Do You Love Me?”, “Soft Cop,” and, best of them all, “Joey and Jerome’s Artistic Meaningful Independent Film.”

After sitting through a couple more shorts, we settled in to the bad lecture hall seats at the Innis Town Hall Theatre for Certifiably Jonathan. It’s a “mockumentary” by Jim Pasternak that follows around 78 year old comedian Jonathan Winters as he tries to gain some credibility as a contemporary painter and get his work shown at the Museum of Modern Art. Winters is best known for his appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. His particular brand of stand up comedy was pretty revolutionary for the time, or so I’ve read, as I’m not old enough to remember Winters on TV at all. He was supposedly great at improv and impersonations at a time when all guys were really doing was telling jokes, and is apparently known among many comedians as an extremely influential figure.

This explains the list of comedians and actors that appear in this movie and the reverance they show for Winters: Jim Carrey, Howie Mandel, Sarah Silverman, Jimmy Kimmel, Jeffrey Tambor, Rob Reiner, Ryan Stiles, several Arquette siblings (I don’t know which ones), Nora Dunn, and Winters’s good friend Robin Williams all show up.

And a lot of it’s funny. It’s mostly the mockumentary plot that doesn’t work real well for me. Pasternak arranges a show of Winters’s paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, leading to one of the funniest scenes of the movie where Pasternak comes to tell Winters about the show and finds him trying to sell paintings on the street. The gallery asks that Winters do three new paintings for the show. But when Winters’s favourite painting is stolen, Winters loses his sense of humour and finds he can’t paint anymore because of it. Most of the comedians and actors come in to help Winters find it again; the Arquette’s hold some kind of bizarre seance for it, which really makes no sense, Stiles takes him mini-golfing, Mandel takes him to Target in an especially funny scene because “Americans find everything at Target,” Silverman takes him to the video store and offers to show him her boobs, etc.

But all the plot really ends up doing is putting restrictions on Winters’s interactions with these other funny people, and reminding everyone watching that this isn’t really a documentary, much as it tries to look like one. And it does up to a certain point; I didn’t know it was a mockumentary going in, and until Winters had his painting stolen and I thought “wow, what are the odds that would happen while they’re following him around with a camera…oh” it was decent documentary stuff. What’s worse, in spots Certifiably Jonathan seems to lose this fairly simple plot completely and only pick it up again when it’s convenient. Winters keeps insisting to people that a “witch doctor” assaulted him in a bathroom and sucked the humour out of him, but aside from a scene where Winters tries to hire a contract killer to find this witch doctor nothing really comes out of this. Pasternak somehow gets his hands on a reproduction of the painting that was stolen, but how is a bit muddled, and once Winters gets this copy it’s never mentioned again. The method by which Winters finally does get his show at MoMA in the end after they rejected him is a bit confusing and a lot weird.

Only two things in this movie really ring true: Jonathan Winters may well be insane, and his paintings are amazingly good. So good that I’d really like a print of one. It’s modern abstract art, but at the same time warm and easy to understand. Some of the paintings seen in the movie are better than others, of course, but the best ones are really, really good.

As for the movie, well, I liked it, but I can’t help but think more of a documentary form, following Winters around and letting him mug for the camera as much as he wants and showing off his art and interacting with the rest of the funny people the movie has in it, would’ve been more entertaining. The tacked on mockumentary plot doesn’t do a lot for me.

3.5/5