Bernard and Huey

Bernard and Huey is a small pleasure; it’s almost always welcome to watch a character-based film crafted without pretentions.

As you might hope for a film with a script from the great Jules Feiffer, Dan Mirvish’s Bernard and Huey bristles with anxious, circuitous, hilarious talk.

Chatty, self-absorbed, streetwise and sex obsessed, even if he wasn’t drawing his quintessential “New York types,” we’d call Jules Feiffer’s characters “cartoons.”

It's the female performers who steal the show, especially Whitman as the uber-confident Zelda and Alexander as the girlfriend who tolerates Bernard's immaturity even while calling him out for it.

Devoted Feifferites, not to mention fans of Mr. Rash and Mr. Koechner, who get to flex their muscles nicely here, will be well sated.

Like its developmentally-arrested, misbehaving man-children, the long-shelved source material hasn’t aged particularly well.

Bernard and Huey isn’t particularly funny, although the script does tend to pump out a zinger once in a while. It isn’t particularly tragic, because the plight of these characters is well-earned.