More wander, less lust

Wet Hot American Summer, Part 2

Wanderlust (2012), which is a pretty uneven entertainment, is interesting mostly as another bid for mainstream success by members of the sketch comedy group The State, whose heyday was 20 years ago. Given that the group had 11 members, it is not surprising that they have divided into various writing and performing teams, many with overlapping membership. Of all these groupings, the most successful in the movie business has been the screenplay team of Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant, the moving forces behind the relentlessly unfunny Reno 911 and creators of the almost-as-unamusing Night in the Museum series (the entertainment value of which is almostly entirely derived from the odd-couple teaming of Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney). Lennon and Garant are also engaged to “punch up” other writers scripts and have even published a book on how to sell out and write crappy Hollywood movies.

Director and co-writer David Wain and co-writer and actor Ken Marino have done the most to keep the anarchic spirit of The State alive, progressing from the episodic cult hit Wet Hot American Summer through the sketch comedy The Ten (of which I am,as far as I can find, the world's only fan although I think less than half of the movie works) to the mentorship of Judd Apatow, who sponsored Wain and Marino's Role Models, which made enough money to make Universal ask for another film from the Wain-Marino team, again under the Apatow aegis.

Whereas Lennon-Garant have mastered Hollywood formulas well enough to vomit them back up between the covers of a book, Wain and Marino still have to graft stray bits of stories from other movies onto their sketch ideas in order to get their 90 minutes of entertainment to resemble a movie. Most egregiously in Wanderlust, they manufacture a crisis for the entire cast of characters very late in the second act without a scrap of foreshadowing, then dismiss it with the airiest of deus ex machinas, almost as if to acknowledge that narrative is a stupid waste of time in their eyes. From interviews with the creators, it is evident that they write by proceeding from ideas and concepts rather than characters, a procedure which is painfully obvious in the finished work.

Moreover, when it comes to the jokes, Wain and Marino veer rapidly from drastically overstating and repeating their jokes to throwing them away so as to be almost invisible. Endless amounts of time are spent on toilets in this movie, with little additional comic effect after the first statement of the joke. On the other hand, one of the best laughs in the film is invisible as Justin Theroux dismisses Paul Rudd's categorization of his group as a “commune.” “Communes” he scoffs, just means “hippies smoking pot and playing guitars” as he leans against a doorway through which we see and hear a room full of hippies smoking pot and playing guitars. There is no cut-in, no take, no signal to the audience that there has been a joke, which is admirable, but perhaps self-defeating.

The single best comic performance (other than Alan Alda, who gets better and better at kidding his own persona) is by the film's editors, David Moritz and David Nassau who create and improve innumberable jokes with some superb cuts and juxtapositions.  In fact, the very first out-loud laugh in the film involves the cut into the title card itself.  

The question remains as to whether Wain and Marino will ever successfully fuse their sketch-oriented form of humor, based on wildly exaggerated characters and an improvisatory freedom with a real story in which real characters wrestle with real stakes.  In The Silent Clowns, Walter Kerr described Harold Lloyd as an "architect of sympathy," building the gags in his films into a narrative structure that virtually forced the audience to feel for the main character and want his dreams to be realized.  What made Lloyd (and Chaplin and Keaton) great is that the narrative push in their best films was not imported from exterior sources but grew up out of the characters and the visual comedy they were prone to, given the quirks and proclivities of those characters.  Character, narrative and gag were all fused, rather than being pasted together.  That takes a lot of time and a lot of films (Lloyd may have made 100 short comedies before arriving at the character who made him great.)  I hope Mr. Wain and Mr. Marino have the opportunity and the ability to realize that fusion.

All talk

Easy A (2010) sets out to be a modern gloss on The Scarlet Letter in which a woman who is actually a victim becomes an outcast for her presumed audacity; whereas the film actually corresponds more closely to another fictional work about Puritan New England, The Crucible, about the importance of honoring the truth, and the value of preserving one's good name.

It is also an hommage to the 80s teen comedies it explicitly references, especially in that the very prospect of a girl acknowledging having had sex causes a sensation throughout the school. I cannot imagine the high school in the United States in 2011 where this would be a sensation, nevertheless it is an essential premise of this story, without which nothing would follow. In fact, the entire film takes place in a strange make-believe world, which is probably what makes some unpalatable ideas tolerable.

Happily, this make-believe world is populated with superbly funny supporting character actors whose presence is clearly aimed at moviegoers older than the apparent intended audience. It is difficult to conceive that the lovable, affable hippies played by Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson could have raised such a well-balanced character as Olive, but it is an attractive fantasy. (One wonders about the non-intuitive pairing of Tucci and Clarkson, who exhibit flawless teamwork until one learns that they are longtime close friends.) Thomas Haden Church, who used to excel at playing obnoxious jerks is here admirable, not least for the fact that his character behaves as if he was a jerk, not acknowledging how caring and funny he is. And Lisa Kudrow deserves a medal for consistently not giving a damn about her "image" and seeking out the interesting roles.

Finally, there is Dan Byrd, who has emerged from the mill of TV sitcoms and here lends an unexpected depth of emotion to what begins as a farcical solution to a farcical problem. As is typical for these films, the high-schoolers look old enough to be delivering their doctoral dissertations--one of them is actually identified as being 22, but he is hardly the oldest-looking "student" around. Some day someone will make a high school movie with 16-year-olds and the universe will probably implode.

But Easy A's greatest accomplishment is to have made a teen sex comedy without any sex, which brings me back to my initial point -- the story is about names, the names you're given and the name you make for yourself. At the outset, our heroine is Olive because she believes she is drab. Her girl friend is Rhiannon, a name nobody heard of until some celebrity turned up with that made-up concoction. Her gay friend is Brandon, who has both been "branded", that is, marked as gay (and therefore outcast), but also might turn out to be Brando, both a great actor and a celebrity (and leaves Ojai to find out). Her object of desire is not like other high school boys; although handsome, he is (T)odd. So I only wish that Olive, instead of adopting Hester Prynne's "A" which she has not in fact earned, had at the end, when she decides to start telling the truth about who and what she is had only repeated the words of John Proctor, who upon being asked why he will not sign his name to a false confession, thought it could save his life, tells his judge:

Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

[My daughter praised the film for being an accurate reflection of what it is like to be an under-estimated over-achiever, the kind of girl whose accomplishments and good sense are so taken for granted that she can inadvertently be given the latitude to make the kind of serious mistakes that more average kids may never have. And such a person's abilities are taken for granted, his or her judgment may be over-estimated -- thus, they can find themselves over their heads without a real confidant or mentor to be relied on to dig themselves out.]

I was reminded of another sexless sex comedy based on a lie. Marriage Italian Style (1965) is a terrible title (meant to remind filmgoers of a prior success, Divorce Italian Style) for an adaptation of a classic of the Italian stage, Filumena Marturano. The story begins with a lie: Domenico's long-time mistress, Filumena is dying, and he needs to marry her before she expires and goes to hell. The marriage proceeds, the deception revealed and Domenico is furious, and seeks an annulment on the basis of deception.

This is the reverse of Easy A -- Filumena is being denied the name "Signora Soriano" although she is clearly entitled to it. She runs his household, keeps the books for his businesses, and, unbeknownst to him raised the son she had by him, along with two other sons by other men. Ostensibly, Domenico will not marry her because he wants to marry his younger girlfriend, but what that really means is that Filumena HAS already become The Wife -- the undesirable but indispensable life partner whose loyalty a man hopes to purchase at the lowest price possible -- even nothing, not even affection. (One wonders if the Latin man has a problem with this because he has been conditioned to love the woman who cannot be desired The Mother. Once The Wife becomes a Mother, either to one's children or to oneself, she is, by definition, undesirable.)

It is interesting to see Sophia Loren at this relatively early stage in her career (about 10 years as a star with 45 to follow--so far) playing the cast-off, the discarded woman; although of course, she is quite able to play the desirable young trollop in the flashback scenes. And Mastroianni was always the master of spiritual weariness. What is particularly striking is Domenico's odd formality with the three young men, any of whom might be his son. What frightens him and prevents him from showing genuine warmth is not the fear that they will make demands of him, but that he will feel attachment and need for his son -- or worse, for all of Filumena's sons. The fact that none of them want his money confirms it. Domenico cannot relate to a family member who is not a supplicant; and one who may give him something he can't admit needing: love and respect.

The film is not afraid to be abrasive, to make both Domenico and Filumena seem cruel at times, and one wonders what sharper, harsher directions Easy A could have gone in; a different set of parents, a girl with less sense of self. A girl who could let herself be victimized until the day...