Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Everybody
Must Get Stoned
(The Wackness and Pineapple Express, 8/25/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
If
you aren't a movie superhero these days, you might as well be wasted.
From Harold & Kumar to Weeds to Seth Rogen in anything, we're
up to our roach-clips in adorable stoners, and I'd bet my stash of Strawberry
Cough to bong water we're in for more. In a way, it's understandable:
since most young folks find it dull to invest much in fighting The Man
these days, lighting up is about the only publicly acceptable form of
social protest we've got. Young white males, in particular, can opt
out of the system without looking too much like whiny losers—as
long as they spend their unemployed hours sucking a water-pipe.
Jonathan Levine's The Wackness
is a coming-of-age stoner comedy that at least has the courage to suggest
grass isn't everything. Luke (Josh Peck) is a 1994 high school graduate
enduring the last, dull summer before heading off to his safety school.
For money, he sells chronic out of an ice cream cart in Central Park—a
dangerous-sounding occupation in Rudy Guiliani's New York, but the cops
are the last of his worries. Luke, you see, is that rare sort of drug
dealer who can't find friends or girls. For solace from life's general
"wackness," he turns to Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), a half-mad
psychoanalyst who trades therapy for dope, and who is even less equipped
to deal with his age-related issues.
It's probably not news to anybody
that the only guy more foolish than a horny teen is a grown man suffering
his mid-life crisis. But Levine (who also wrote the script) does a good
job of putting together this not-so-dynamic duo, supplying some genuinely
tender moments along the way. Credit is due Ben Kingsley—from Gandhi
to gangsters, is there anything this guy can't play?—and the young
Josh Peck. Though he plays a character desperate to be loved, he never
winks at the audience, never betrays the air of poetic sadness that
seems to surround some people, no matter what they're smoking. Luke's
climb from depression up to mere misery is an achievement, and Peck
makes us believe in it.
* * *
David
Gordon Green's Pineapple Express is less lofty fare. The latest
blast from the Judd Apatow juggernaut (Apatow gets producer and story
credit) is your standard issue action romp, with our heroes Dale (Seth
Rogen) and Saul (James Franco) on the run from the kind of drug dealers
who take their business, like, way too seriously. Rogen is the mirror
opposite of Luke in The Wackness: his job is depressing (he delivers
subpoenas) but he's too chemically-adjusted to care. Franco, who seems
eerily comfortable with dimness, is his too-friendly dealer. At their
best, these two flirt with becoming the Laurel and Hardy of stoner comedy.
In case somebody didn't get the
gay subtext of last year's Superbad, Express tweaks the
audience's hetero anxiety by putting the "bromance" right
on the surface. (At one point, Franco actually calls Rogen his "bro-mosexual";
one gathers there never a Laurel and Hardy comedy where Hardy loosens
the ropes around Laurel's wrists by dry-humping him.) As long as Express
keeps the tone light, it's sort of like Rogen himself—amiable,
with great big dollops of self-deprecating wit. But the movie goes seriously
wrong (and becomes seriously dull) when it tries to become a mock actioner
in the style of Hot Fuzz. I mean, do we really need to see one
of the bad guys graphically crushed by a car? A stoner comedy is entitled
to be juvenile, and it can make no sense, but it should never, ever
be a buzzkill.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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