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Glory Days, They'll Pass You By...
Will Ferrell throws himself into the role of Frank "The
Tank" like John Belushi throwing himself off the desk
of "Weekend Update" during an editorial. Frank is
an early-thirties middle class guy who just got married less
out of love, and more out of his wife's desire to have her
friends stop bothering her about not being married. Frank
is the kind of guy whose heart is as big as his gut, but whose
exuberance gets the better of his judgment. Yes, he wants
to have a good time, but more importantly, he wants everyone
else to have a good time. This is his one true skill in life,
yet he lacks the self-awareness to parlay his joie de vivre
into a career. So he does the only thing he knows how:
Try to be the life of the party.
As an actor, Ferrell operates the same way: You get the sense
that he'll feel he's failed if he's not funny, so he throws
himself into every gag with a reckless abandonment of self-consciousness.
There's a sincerity in his eyes that's part acting and part
metacognition: When Farrell declares that "We're going
streaking," he does so not just as Frank the Tank at
the party in the movie, but as Farrell the actor on behalf
of the movie itself. Farrell willingly offers Frank as the
butt of jokes, but he's savvy enough not to wink at the camera
so that a beat after the punch line, our laughter transmutes
into empathy, even sympathy. As an actor, Farrell disregards
his own dignity to get a laugh, which is what shock comics
do, but Farrell's character disregards his own dignity
to get a laugh. This adds a layer to the performance that
transcends the usual comic mugging. Normally in this sort
of comedy, everybody gets their token redemption, but Frank's
destination is bittersweet. We're introduced to Frank by a
crappy wedding singer belting out an overzealous cover of
"Total Eclipse of the Heart" ("I fuckin'
need you more than ever!"); our last glimpse is The
Tank at the supermarket, filling his cart with bachelor food,
pumping his fists because he kinda-sorta got asked on a date.
I thought we might be in for something special when the
Todd Phillips had the good taste to cast Jeremy Piven as the
No-Fun Dean. Piven, the impresario of the Pit at Port Chester
University (better known as P.C.U.), is one of the
inspirations for this film, but I wish it had gone more of
the Fight Club route. Good guy Mitch (Luke Wilson),
an attorney with a job Lester Burnham would find dull, is
dumped by his S and M obsessed girlfriend (Juliette Lewis).
He buys a house near campus, which best friend Beanie (Vince
Vaughn), a college-dropout, speaker superstore tycoon, decides
should be an "equal-opportunity, egalitarian community."
This is the problem. The "egalitarian" fraternity
becomes a vehicle for a whole bunch of old man, fat black
guy, foreigners-with-accents jokes.
The film's central joke is that these guys have settled into
"average" lives such that they're no longer exciting
or attractive to women, so they reinvent and reinvigorate
themselves by temporarily returning to their college years.
This is material much covered by the rash of Complacent Middle
Class comedies in which the uptight are visited by spirits
of the past (The Banger Sisters or American Beauty),
but Old School's advantage should be in the opportunities
proposed by its conceit. Old School does literally
what most other similarly-themed films do figuratively: The
juvenile regression. The problem is that Old School doesn't
follow the idea to its conclusion: The fraternity should be
populated by guys seeking asylum from the soul-crushing lives
they chose. One of the best lines of the film is when Matt
Walsh (the tall guy from "The Daily Show") stands
with Rob Corddry (the balding guy from "The Daily Show")
and asks Mitch about pledging the fraternity: "I need
this," he says.
Exactly. Had rush become more Operation Mayhem rather than
an excuse for a four hundred pound black kid to vault during
a gymnastics competition, then Old School could have
transcended its limitations as a Big Dumb Comedy. I understand
the filmmaker's fears that audience might not get it, but
we would have followed the three leads wherever they chose
to take us. The movie works, in its way, because Wilson, Vaughn,
and Farrell essentially rush us. I signed my pledge form when
Mitch garnered Tyler Durden-ish worship, Vaughn threw a kid's
birthday party while chain smoking in a clown suit, and when
Farrell interrupted Snoop Doggy Dog to announce his intent
to streak. Had that been Meat Loaf and his Bitch Tits
who vaulted at the gymnastic competition, Old School might
have become something special.
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