” it smells like Willie Nelson’s braids”
When the promotions for this film starting hitting the internet for me to see rather than me saying that it’s a new Paul Rudd movie that I’d find interestingly weird I immediately said that it’s a new Jennifer Aniston movie which would be predictably boring. So after weeks of critics around the world proclaiming this to be more of a Rudd film than an Aniston I decided that it was worth a shot, and I’m happy to say that it is that: worth a shot.
Filmmaker David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer, The Ten and Role Models) decides to imagine what it would be like to have a relationship drama where the vehicle that pushes that relationship to the next level would be a free living commune.
Comedy is one of the weirdest genres of filmmaking. If you take a look at comedy from the concept of a stand-up comedy you can see that there’s a person on stage telling a five-minute (or however long) joke and it fails or succeeds and then he moves on to the next one. In film it’s expected that it would be tied into the story, which is a singular cohesive idea being fleshed out over the entire runtime. Here however we receive more of the former than the later, where while the dramatic arc of George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) and their relationship is told over the span of 98-minutes, we’re taken on a series of five minute bit jokes from us laughing at how Carvin (Alan Alda) keeps saying all the names of the founders of the commune, and Eva (Malin Akerman) offering to have sex with George or even Rick (Ken Marino) being an asshole in an ironically humourous way that we laugh at because we all know that asshole and just want to laugh at him rather than punch him in the face.
So the question is when a film like this comes along and you may spend a couple of jokes here in stitches and a couple of others just bored by them do you reward it for trying like you do a stand-up doing fresh material in an underground club that he just happened to appear in? David Wain is presenting his fourth theatrical film and more than three series which can all be classified as a comedian continually trying out new material, so is it okay for that to happen or should I be critiquing him on those dull points?
I enjoy seeing filmmakers, whether it’s Terrence Malick or David Wain, taking risks with a story and trying something that maybe others wouldn’t so I prefer to lean on the side of praise rather than just attempting my best to somehow put a black mark on his pretty cult loved record. However, be warned that this is not a perfect film and doesn’t come without its own trappings.