DUDES GONE WILD

The Hangover, reviewed

Batchelor party becomes recon mission as three uber-dudes are forced to retrieve the groom-to-be from the clutches of Vegas after he disappears mid-debauchery in Todd Phillips’ The Hangover.

Justin Bartha plays the groom, excised from most of the running time, and Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis play the three amigos scouring Vegas for their fallen comrade. Cooper is the straight man, the balance between Helms’ neurotic clicking and Galifianakis’ autistic jabbering, and the overall dynamic of the film suffers as only the latter two deliver any sort of juice. After a curiously and unironically morose title sequence (one wonders if we were meant to believe initially that a film advertised as the ultimate Vegas comedy would actually turn out to be an existential thriller by the Coens or John Dahl), The Hangover introduces its characters posthaste – each united by an expediently proffered need to escape their emasculated lives – and gets them to Vegas within fifteen minutes.

The nonentity played by Bradley Cooper is the ostensible star of the whole thing, and perhaps the most relatable to the target audience’s idealized self: good-looking, with a bit of money and taste for wine, women and song. He is the lovable, hunky scoundrel, full of common sense and sex appeal: the utterly straight man. Both the screenplay’s languid character beats and Cooper’s hollow performance erase the character from memory almost immediately, and his continued presence onscreen only perturbs when it could and should facilitate the story or underscore the insanity of his costars. One hopes, on the other hand, that Galifianakis and Helms form a lifetime cinematic bond and remain inseparable onscreen until they’re remaking Grumpy Old Men in forty years. Each playing a variation of an established persona – Helms’ high-strung, if naïve, drone on NBC’s The Office and Galifianakis’ absurdity-spouting standup creation – the two strike a hilariously off-kilter tone throughout as comic foils, reminiscent of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber, albeit on Ritalin and Ketamine, respectively. Their antics, particularly those involving Galifianakis and an infant, appear largely improvised, whereas all hilarity provided by the script feels labored and unconvincing by comparison. We can only hope that Helms and Galifianakis each find a better forum for their work in the future.

The rest of the film’s (presumably scripted) jollies involve a swishy Asian gangster, a bumbling drug dealer, a dimwitted hooker and two of Vegas’ finest on a taser bender. If it seems disingenuous merely listing the supporting players as the film’s roadside attractions, it is in keeping with the spirit of The Hangover, which ambles lazily from loony character to zany situation and back again without much in the way of transition or rhythm. Accordingly, trotting out Mike Tyson, as himself, mid-film, feels desperate, the same sort of pretzled irony that makes Chuck Norris jokes so tedious: Dude, it’s Mike Tyson... in the movie! Playing himself! That’s so random! There’s something very safe about this kind of rote transgression; ten years ago a Mike Tyson cameo could have been a ballsy move in a mainstream Hollywood comedy, but at this historical remove it’s about as benign as a guest appearance by Mr. T or MacGyver.

Unfortunately engineered to be exactly as daring as is permissible for a contemporary studio film and not a single degree more, Phillips’ proudest visual achievements are parodies of notable Vegas movies, though the referenced films (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Casino, Rain Man) exhibited much greater insight concerning the pleasures and terrors of sin city. If the film had a more modest set of ambitions for itself, its failures could be forgivable, but the film is so loud and bombastic in its self-definition as a comedy of ultimate excess that it buckles under the strain of its own ambitions, which Galifianakis and Helms prove unable to support, though not for a lack of trying.

Even as the film fails to provide enough laughs across its running time, it is refreshing in its utter disdain for all manifestations of maturity, which gives it a defiant leg up on the recent spat of “bromance” comedies, making them appear duplicitous in contrast. In the past few years, Judd Apatow has reinvigorated the lovable loser to his greatest proportions in decades, having grown the archetype outward in both directions, simultaneously leaving it relentlessly crass and hopelessly (painfully) maudlin. In a sense, what Phillips does is much harder: he makes movies, often very funny movies, about privileged white males behaving like regressed, adolescent versions of their privileged white selves. Lovable losers they are not; rather, they are aggressive, hormonal and largely unsentimental frat types carefully driven down a peg or two for comic relief while still emerging as sympathetic heroes. This is not a feat worthy of canonization, and The Hangover’s homophobia and sexism should not go unnoticed, but one can’t help but admire a body of work that revels so thoroughly in its own stink, bereft of the sentimental concessions that mar far superior works. Phillips’ films have thus far lacked the saccharine anesthetic that dilutes the sting of Apatow’s work, making them a pleasant alternative to the chick-flicks in cargo shorts that have become so lucrative and ubiquitous in recent years. Somewhat ironically (at least at first glance), The Hangover has resonated with female audiences, perhaps as a result of this refusal to placate or condescend to them as a demographic ripe for conquest, the obnoxious, market-driven ploy that hampers the efforts of Phillips' contemporaries (1).

Despite the dramatic trappings that require him to punish all transgressions and reaffirm the family life as the ultimate aim for American males, it is to Phillips’ credit that he never truly betrays his instincts. He provides a hurried sense of domestic tranquility with a largely uninteresting denouement, but the associations he’s provided between betrothal and misery are not so easily ameliorated. Helms’ character drowns in the P.C. universe constructed for him by the emancipated, domineering and unfaithful (the portrait implies the conflation of all three traits without getting too specific) fiancée played by Rachel Harris, while Cooper describes his married life as utter hell at the slightest provocation. Galafianakis remains blissfully unaware of romantic entanglements, and indicates only the most rudimentary understanding of sexuality (his characters’ poor imitations of adult behavior at time recall a more subtle variation of Peter Sellers’ Chauncey Gardiner.) It’s not insignificant that the only character content to exist within his long-term monogamous relationship disappears for all but ten minutes of the film’s running time.

The film could, perhaps, be read as a journey of domesticity reclaimed by its malcontents, but the actual search at the story’s core is merely pretext for three men behaving badly (or struggling to recall the previous evening’s bad behavior), as opposed to a semiotic field worth mining. Whereas most recent mainstream comedies (romantic and otherwise) seem to believe earnestly in the normalizing, stabilizing power of domestic partnership and true love, Phillips is far more at ease detailing the hideous side of interpersonal commitment and the consequent regression of grown men to the earlier, unbound stages of their development. This commitment to the noncommittal has its cringe-worthy excesses –Helms triumphantly jettisons his feminazi (the shrew whose freedom has been achieved at the expense of his own) at the film’s end to woo a hooker, overcoming his disgust at the latter’s low socioeconomic status, and thereby indulges the privileged white male’s most idiotic fantasy of social, sexual and economic transience – but it is mostly harmless. While there is much to be said for the place of stability and domesticity in the overall development of young men, The Hangover’s lack of pretension in this arena is refreshing. Here is a film that is unafraid of its desire for a purely homo-social civilization, and it is absolutely shameless in the most fantastic sense. Phillips understands that ruminations on the lure of family life are not quite the best proposition for screen comedy. His more talented peers would be well-advised to take note.

Despite a plot twist (leading up to Phillips’ most hilarious directorial flourish: a pitch-perfect Rain Man homage/parody) requiring big casino winnings, there’s nothing to convince the audience that the film couldn’t have happened anywhere. For all of its supposed (and heavily advertised) Vegas-ness, The Hangover is more or less After Hours in the desert: not a bad idea in and of itself, but the result feels like the film missed an opportunity to make an indelible Las Vegas comedy. It narrowly avoids coming across as merely a 80-proof episode of Comedy Central’s Reno 911!, which is about the extent of its achievements. Sadly, Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trifles are far funnier, cleverer and more enjoyable than this would-be romp, which never fully exploits Vegas for all its worth. Vegas may be the ideal setting for rutting white guys, but these dudes fail to capitalize on its true possibilities.


The Hangover / USA / 2009 / Color / 100 min. / Directed by Todd Phillips / Written by John Lucas and Scott Moore / Starring: Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms, Justin Bartha and Heather Graham / Warner Bros.

Notes:
1 – Though its presumptions are based solely on the grosses of the film’s opening weekend, the article located at http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-bigpicture9-2009jun09,0,1401760.story cites the enthusiasm of female audiences (though somewhat anecdotally) as one reason for the film’s unexpected financial success.