Friday, December 18, 2009
The Hangover
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Mature men behaving badly has long been a source of bawdy farce in popular cinema. Pack ‘em up for a golf getaway, college reunion, or worse - a bachelor party - and watch the wheels come off. For each beer, the maturity level regresses five years and invariably nakedness, projectile vomit and a run in with the law ensue. You know the lot: the studly jock who’s an unstoppable instigator, the nice guy who holds the group together and the social misfit who overcomes his shortcomings to save the day.
Director Todd Phillips has made a career out of such ripe fruit. Road Trip and School for Scoundrels were commercial misfires, but Old School nailed the formula, playing up the complexity of its characters while still capitalizing on an egregious shot of Will Ferrell’s bare backside. It almost achieved the perfect balance of gross out humor and tender human drama for which There’s Something About Mary has become the paragon.
The good news is that Phillips’s latest, The Hangover, is more akin to Old School (including the silly, unsexy nakedness) than the director’s other dude-disasters.
The set up - four guys who get furloughed for a bachelor party weekend in Las Vegas (I’ll spare you the “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” and “Sin City” references, though the flick loves them,) have just hours until the wedding to make right all that went wrong the night before - may be de ja vu, it’s the baggage the characters bring to the story that make it funnier and spicier than expected.
As implied by the title, the misadventure begins the day after. The lot awakes in a posh, $4,000/night Pavilion Suite at Caesar’s Palace. The couch is smoldering, a chicken randomly struts across the marble floor. There’s a tiger in the bathroom and a baby in the closet. And just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, the guys find the groom-to-be missing; and of course, none of the surviving three can remember what happened.
From there we rewind.
Doug (Justin Bartha), the wayward bachelor, and Phil (Bradley Cooper), the hunky pied piper of party, are mostly garnish. It’s Alan (Zach Galifianakis), the beastly bearded, oddball brother-in-law-to-be reluctantly invited along, and Stu (Ed Helms), the henpecked dentist with self esteem issues, who give the audience reason to buy in.
Helms, Andy from The Office, should see his stock rise, while Galifianakis, who’s a less boisterous, more cerebral incarnation of Jack Black before he became a film staple, seems poised for a breakout.
Locating the missing groom and getting him to church on time is the urgent mission (heightened by frantic calls from the bride in waiting) that propels the trio through their crippling hangovers out into Vegas. With each new clue and each new venue the events of the night before become clearer and the stakes rise exponentially.
Though the film is guilty of leaving some loose ends dangling, The Hangover takes enough chances and unexpected turns to more than make up for it . Without giving too much away, the vehicle that the valet delivers to the guys the next morning, and what pops out of its trunk, are destined to become movie lore along with Will Ferrell’s solo streaking and Cameron Diaz’s organic hair gel. Even Mike Tyson shows up in a pivotal role, playing a harsher incarnation of himself than the vulnerable, bear all persona he recently unveiled in James Toback’s documentary Tyson.
I give Phillips and his writers credit for attempting to bring it all home and reveal something bigger about self discovery and the human spirit. It doesn’t succeed to the deft degree that Sideways did (that’s a tall order for any film) and it’s not as dark as Very Bad Things (at no time in The Hangover, where there is plenty of menacing entities, do you ever really feel any true peril), but it does fill the middle ground humbly, like a glass of Alka-Seltzer the day after.
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