Hello all! My name is Nick McCathy, and I’ve been a reader—and unfortunately infrequent commenter—of The Film Experience for roughly six years. Nathaniel recently introduced me here, and it's a pleasure to meet you all as well. I’ve written for The L Magazine, Boston Phoenix, Moviefone, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center Blog, and now I’m glad to find an occasional home here. I hope you find my credentials worthy, my spirit playful, and my addition to this palace of cinema and actressexuality that Nathaniel has built to be inspired.
In direct contrast to my introduction, I would like to start by celebrating a few celebrity birthdays, and congratulate them for continuing the tradition of living (well, except one of them).
Today, July 23rd, Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe, turns 22. Potbellied, Oscar-winning master of schlub Phillip Seymour Hoffman turns 44. Potboiler-cum-masterpiece noir author (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and screenwriter (Oscar nominated for co-writing Double Indemnity and writing The Blue Dahlia), Raymond Chandler would have turned 123 today.
And, most significantly, everyone’s favorite Hollywood pothead and two-time Oscar nominee, Woody Harrelson (you heard me right, Matthew McConaughey), turns the big 50 today.
What’s your favorite performance by Mr. Woodrow Tracy Harrelson?
He has had, and continues to have, such a strange career; I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone had different answers. He's unsurprisingly awarded more for his dramatic work, which is very good, but I find his best comedic performance to be his gleefully sleazy, broken, and banged-up Roy Munson in Kingpin.
You can see two of these birthday boys in the movie theater this week: Radcliffe in a little film called Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Deux and Woody Harrelson in Friends with Benefits (although I would proceed with caution since it's only an ugly gay-panic stereotype).
While Friends with Benefits has no surface relation to the play on words with the prefix “pot,” it is relevant; it brutally suffers from a rapidly developing modern sickness in cinema known as the “Pot Calling the Kettle Black” Syndrome. In order to illustrate my point on this gross metatextual trend of hypocrisy within modern “smart” romantic comedies, I’m going to use another film you may not know (let’s hope, at least—and I apologize in advance). On a lazy Sunday afternoon two weeks ago, a friend and I discovered the major flaw of having Netflix Watch Instant connected to my living room television when we flippantly decided to watch Surburban Girl.
This 2007, straight-to-DVD Tribeca Film festival alum revolves around Sarah Michelle Gellar’s junior publishing editor who wants to get ahead in the industry and starts dating a publishing giant played by Alec Baldwin, despite claiming that she will not just sleep her way to a promotion (despite the fact that she apparently had one of the biggest offices while only being an Associate Editor). As a junior publishing editor who never sees his occupation accurately portrayed, I knew there was high potential for complete disaster, with colorful commentary from us to complement the movie. And, yes, it is a bombardment of clichés and glamorized New York City lifestyles; mostly, though, it is a stale execution of what Bridget Jones Diary does right with the formula. I mention Bridget Jones not just because it’s a paragon of a successful way to follow romantic comedy tropes, but because there’s one piece of dialogue in the film, when Alec Baldwin’s character asks Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character what types of manuscripts she has been assigned to read from the slushpile, that goes something like this:
Oh, just a bunch of bad Bridget Jones knock-offs.
At this moment, I wondered aloud whether the film was self-aware enough to get its own reference. We concluded that, given what we had seen and would see up until the brutal conclusion, the film was too naïve to actually be making an astute meta reference.
This brings me to Friends with Benefits, in which not just one line, but roughly half, of the dialogue is composed of references to the unrealistic situations and expectations romantic comedies give young women. And then, of course, every other scene is filled with unrealistic situations and romantic expectations, and misunderstandings, and neat emotional cruxes, and horrendous supporting characters (more on that later). Within the first five minutes, Mila Kunis’ character extols the wonder of Pretty Woman one moment and then, after being dumped outside the movie theater before actually seeing it again on the big screen, she kicks a poster for The Ugly Truth (another film, which purports to deconstruct male-female dynamic but simply reinforced them, with a case of PCTKB Syndrome) and curses the name of Katherine Heigl and all similar romantic comedy leading ladies. Roughly twenty minutes later in the film, Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake’s characters are sitting on the couch, getting chummy while mocking the artificiality of the faux, New York City-themed film-within-a-film (starring superior, self-aware mavens Jason Segel and Rashida Jones) they’re watching. Soon after, the two characters sleep together for the first time, and the film goes on romantic autopilot yet spends a majority of time trying to skewer it own genre; the hypocrisy only grows stronger and stronger.
Friends with the benefit of gorgeous bodies, delusional romantic comedies, beer, and air conditioning.
As a consequence, Friends with Benefits treats these moments less as psychological insights into the way people delude themselves and more as irritating, above-it-all affectation; it's full of rom-com hypocrisy, and the actors yell their lines at a rapid speed (either mistaking that for clever presentation, or cleverly avoiding any chance they might have to taste the rancid dialogue).
I won’t spoil the proceeding situations and inevitable denouement, but it’s hardly a wonder of self-reflexive filmmaking. I appreciate the audacity of self-awareness, and to criticize a genre even when you’re working within the same medium and form, but Friends with Benefits is no Adaptation or The Player. This should not have been a surprise, since Will Gluck’s previous film, Easy A, was full of contrived dialogue and hinted at an interest to deconstruct genre as well. Claiming genre superiority when your film seems to be based off a Cosmopolitan article is not exactly the soundest logic. Are we all just becoming too self-aware?
Whether it works for you or not, Friends with Benefits is a desperate film that is most offensive when parading around its supporting characters. These sources of “comic relief”—although they’re more likely to elicits groans more than belly laughs—are the oversexed MILF single mother (poor Patty Clarkson), to the perpetually cruising, gay-panic/homophobic portrayal of A Gay Person (poor Woody), to the HILARIOUS--ugh--Alzheimer's papa (poor Richard Jenkins), to the sassy sister (eh, it’s just Jenna Elfman). This film needs more low self-esteem, even though it is boastfully obnoxious enough to spend nearly every minute trying to make you like it and feel superior. Let’s fine-tune the Pot Calling the Kettle Black Syndrome for this one occasion; let’s call it Friends with Benefits calling No Strings Attached bleech.
Granted, I saw Friends with Benefits (after the extended trailer that is Bad Teacher and thoughtful yet slightly affected Beginners--the latter of which makes a pleasant, contemporary companion piece to Tree of Life) because I had a half day at work and needed to escape from the heat. A friend with benefit to me right now is a friend with a/c and cold beer, but this film really struck a chord concerning this modern romantic comedy phenomenon. Can you think of other films with this terribly postmodern syndrome? Is the film successful, or not? Did you see Friends with Benefits this weekend? What did you think of it?