If there is a silver lining to be found in the wholesale dismantling of our nation’s newspaper industry, it must be the forced retirement of a certain kind of film critic. The kind of person who watches a movie like “Knocked Up” and feels the preoccupied need, even while praising it, to reduce it to simply a “lovably profane” romantic comedy. Or the kind of guy who didn’t like — in fact, hated — “The Cable Guy.” Or the legion of people who trashed the insanely enjoyable, riotously funny “Just Friends.”
The truth of it is this: comedy, like music, is generational. With the exception of a few young souls, once you reach the age of, I don’t know, say 50, your opinion begins the slow creep toward irrelevance. I’ll still read your shit. Like, if Manohla Dargis of The New York Times tells me “Terminator Salvation” is the bomb, it would only reinforce my intentions to see the movie. But someone needs to pull these people off the comedy beat because they simply don’t get it anymore. It’s time to surrender those column inches to someone else.
Case in point: the tepid critical response to “Observe and Report.”
“Meet mall cop Paul Blart’s evil, unfunny twin,” wrote Lisa Kennedy of The Denver Post.
“[Director Jody] Hill can only create one sort of protagonist, and half the time he’s stuck in the gray area between satirizing the firearms-obsessed, multidirectionally offensive Ronnie and embracing him,” wrote Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune.
These two represent roughly half the consensus among the nation’s top critics, according to Rotten Tomatoes. Of the people who claimed to enjoy the movie most of them said they couldn’t fully embrace it. Rogen’s mall cop character is too dislikable, they said. The humor is too awkward, they said. Hill makes fun of things that should be out of bounds, they said.
It’s all just too tragic, they said.
With the exception of a few such as Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, the praise and criticism is uniform and dull.
Even if you don’t like the movie, it’s hard to deny the significance of what Hill is building, starting with “The Foot Fist Way” in 2006 to the HBO television series “Eastbound & Down” this year and “Observe and Report” now. “Observe and Report” is shot across the bow of every comedic filmmaker working right now, including Judd Apatow, one of the men responsible for Hill’s breakout success. (Apatow, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay were among the first somebodys to see “Foot Fist Way” and champion the film after its Sundance debut in 2006.) Hill is showing the rest of them were comedy can go and what it’s ignored.
It’s a movie that will take you to familiar places and then gradually kick things up notch after notch until the buddy comedy cliche you’d grown accustomed to crash lands into miasmic territory. More on that in a second.
Seth Rogen stars as Ronnie Barnhardt, chief of security at Forest Ridge Mall in Conway, N.C. Ronnie sees the mall as an American microcosm and has shrunk his entire life to fit inside its walls, which, presumably, he rarely ventures beyond. He and two of his lieutenants, a pair of geeky, overweight, Asian twins, often sit at the shooting range and discuss how completely awesome it would be to enforce mall safety regulations with automatic weapons. For now, they’re forced to settle for batons and mace.
The movie opens with a man in a trench coat running across the parking lot, flashing women, a sequence that’s both hilarious and disturbing. Several days later, the mall is also robbed, but Ronnie keeps focus on catching the flasher, certain it’s the most effective way to become the hero. After all, one of the flasher’s victims is Brandi (Anna Faris), a ditzy cosmetics counter worker who spends her nights drinking in excess and fooling around with questionable men. But to a twisted, lonely guy like Ronnie, she’s beautiful.
A local police detective, servicably played by Ray Liotta, shows up to handle the flasher and is annoyed by Ronnie’s intentions to keep death-grip control on the investigation. So, the two of them battle it out and butt heads, and, eventually, Ronnie wants to be an honest-to-God cop. In the meantime, he keeps his energy focused on Brandi who he more or less strong-arms into a dinner date that ends in one of the movie’s most controversial bedroom scenes. (And no matter what anyone says to you, no matter what you read, yes, that shit is very, very funny.)
It’s important to mention Ronnie is bipolar and medicated. His father left him as a child, and his mother is an unapologetic drunk who lovingly tells him he’s the reason his father abandoned the family. At his core, Ronnie is an incredibly dark, lonesome character comparable to someone like Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” a movie to which many critics have compared “Observe and Report.” This is not by accident. Hill has cited “Taxi Driver” as an influence.
Now, how many studio comedies have you watched where a director cited a classic, urban tragedy as source material? I can’t exactly think of any. I can’t even name similar movies. Maybe “Bad Santa,” but that only tricks you into thinking it’s purely dyspeptic. It’s actually a sweet movie. I’d also compare “Observe and Report” to “Punch-Drunk Love” — if “Punch-Drunk Love” ended with Adam Sandler’s character, Barry Egan, losing the girl and murdering a neighbor in a fit of rage. But he doesn’t. Barry gets the girl, and he lives happily ever after.
This isn’t to say that Rogen’s character simply doesn’t get the girl or doesn’t catch the flasher. Those questions are resolved, but by the end, Rogen reaches those resolutions in his own mangled, grandiose way. And Hill makes sure you’re laughing the entire time no matter how disturbing his characters’ choices are. In fact, he wrote and directed one of the best buddy cop montages I’ve seen in the last 25 years with Rogen and Michael Pena, who plays Dennis, another mall cop. Ronnie finds himself down and out, and Pena picks him up to join forces. They chase teenaged skateboarders in their golf cart and beat them down, punching them, clotheslining them and bashing them in the back of the head with their own skateboarders. (Some of the children seem no older than 12.) They run around the mall. Ronnie watches Dennis do coke. They run around some more. Ronnie watches Dennis shoot heroin.
Some people would call that irresponsible. Hill knows this. Obviously, he does. But he’s saying, it seems, “Look, we make fun of everything. Why can’t we make fun of someone shooting heroin (provided, of course, we already recognize it’s insane and deadly)?” Is it any different than making fun of an alcoholic in a movie (which we do frequently)? Maybe it’s a bit more inappropriate, but, broadly speaking, it’s pretty comparable.
In many ways, Hill has figured out how to dramatize what Sacha Baron Cohen cannot if only because his dramatic clay is, well, real people who are limiting. While Hill certainly doesn’t have the same grand satirical and social ambitions, he has a similar ability to both horrify and amuse you at the same time. He’s got an incredible skill and very distinct taste.
“Observe and Report” is one of the best comedies of 2009. Next to no one will agree with that, and that’s fine.
But give it five to 10 years. Then we’ll see who’s right.
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