It isn’t very easy to get a movie like Paul made these days. First off, it’s a film geared mostly toward film nerds and comic book geeks. Secondly, it’s a foul-mouthed, hard-R comedy. In a world where it is increasingly more expensive to produce and market films, studios are taking every precaution they can to make sure that their new projects are pointed at the largest possible audience. Studios want movies geared toward general audiences, about topics that people are familiar and comfortable with, and any possible corporate tie-in is a plus. This approach tends to churn out boring movies. Got an idea for a monster movie? Make it a Godzilla movie and we’ll talk. Want to make a movie about high-tech soldiers? Tweak it to be about an action figure that we can market and we might have something. Want to make a raunchy comedy? Change all the curse words to pee-pee and doo-doo so parents will drop their kids off to see it and we’ve got a deal. A movie like Paul has to be seen as a risk for the people who paid to get it made; and it has a unique opportunity to either be the last of a dying breed, or the surprise success that spawns other strange studio pictures. It all depends on how many of you go out and see it. But in order to become the last great hope for interesting studio projects, a movie first has to be worth seeing. How does Paul fare in that regard? Mostly it’s a mixed bag.
Paul tells the story of a pair of British comic book nerds on holiday in the US and their introduction and subsequent bonding with a fun loving alien named… Paul. And even though the film is set in the southwest, the alien I’m referring to is from another planet, not another country. This isn’t a political film; it’s a stoner comedy. The plot has a pretty standard road trip structure and it’s largely made up of the DNA of 80s genre films. There’s a little bit of ET in there, a little bit of Close Encounters, a dash of Star Wars and Alien. If you’re hip to that sort of thing then there will be a lot of little Easter eggs for you to pick up on throughout. If not, then you might be a little less appreciative of what Paul has to offer. It’s not that it goes anyplace so nerd inclusive that you won’t understand the film (it has a very straight forward story), it’s just that it relies quite a bit on familiarity with similar material to make you emotionally respond to what you’re getting. Some people love references to the familiar just for reference’s sake. They’re probably going to love Paul. I’m not really in that camp. I can appreciate a good homage coloring an already rich experience, but if all you have to offer is winky remarks about things that have come before, then your movie is going to ring more hollow for me than it will for people that like the feeling of being in on a joke. I’m not saying that Paul has nothing more to offer than reference, per say, but it certainly relies on it quite a bit to keep it’s audience involved. What was particularly strange for me was a big Sigourney Weaver cameo that happens late in the film. We’re supposed to delight at her presence because she played Ripley in the Alien movies. The weird thing was that we hear her voice over a radio throughout the entire movie, and then once we see her face it is presented like some sort of huge surprise. Who that would be amused by a Sigourney Weaver cameo wouldn’t be able to recognize her voice already? And if you don’t know her voice, why would you care at all when she shows up? I’m not going to lie, I got a kick out of a lot of the little references to other films that were peppered throughout Paul, but they weren’t enough to carry the entire movie for me. I wanted more original memories, not just nods to good things half remembered from my childhood.
Pegg and Frost is a pairing that I’ve consistently enjoyed up to this point, but what they do here is significantly different from everything else I’ve seen them do before, so I was a little bit worried about how I would respond to it. They have a very easy back and forth, which makes them a joy to watch interact on the screen, but here they are playing different roles than they have in films like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. There they fall into a well established, easy to follow, straight man and buffoon rhythm. Here they are playing characters much more similar to one another than they ever have before. There isn’t really one serious guy and one fool. They both just kind of embody the stereotype of the hapless nerd. And, honestly, during the first third of the film I was a little bored watching them play the awkward dorks with hearts of gold. Maybe my reaction can be chalked up a bit to an anti-nerd bias. I like some comic books, I can get down on some sci-fi, but I have no real interest in the counter culture that has developed around these things. Both on screen and in real life I want to meet people who offer more complexity than just a bathing of themselves in geek culture. The early scenes that establish who these guys are just play as straight nerd porn. Look at all this sci-fi and super hero stuff at Comic Con! Isn’t it the best? Check out all of these UFO landmarks, don’t you just love The X-Files? If you’re not super into nerd culture then these two characters mostly just look like ridiculous man-children. And on just a base level, you never saw Laurel and Hardy playing a couple of normal guys. They had their archetypes figured out and they exploited them. Where was that patented Pegg and Frost chafing? I came around to their characters towards the end though. They are likable guys and really that shines through in everything that they do. I defy even the wedgie-givingest jock on the planet to not fall in love with their earnest enthusiasm by the end of this movie.
Seth Rogen provides the voice of the alien Paul, and his performance was kind of a mixed bag for me as well. On the one hand, Paul provides a lot of the broad comedy of the film, and Rogen was very funny playing the irreverent life of the party. Ironically, this is more of a Chris Farley-esque party animal character than we’ve ever seen Rogen play on screen, and it comes only when he has dropped a lot of weight in real life and is being animated as a little alien guy. If anything, hearing his performance as Paul makes me interested in seeing him play a live action role that leans a bit crazier than snarky, mumbly guy or mellow stoner. How would Rogen fare playing a Will Ferrel sort of hyperactive nincompoop? Where his performance of Paul faltered for me a bit is in what a distinct voice Rogen has, both sonically and comedically. At no point during this film can you see the character of Paul as anything other than a little cartoon being voiced by Seth Rogen. There’s no immersion, no suspension of disbelief. I would have loved to have seen a voice actor that was able to create a unique voice and a unique character take on Paul so that he could come alive as a real being. As is, I think of ET as being more of a real character than I do Paul, and he could barely talk. This movie would have benefitted greatly from having an alien character that the audience could fall in love with. Instead, we got a bunch of Seth Rogen comedy. It was funny, but it wasn’t utilizing the full potential of the genre.
In addition to those three main characters, there are a bevy of comedic side characters that help color this film as well. The supporting turns of Paul really shine as one of its strongest aspects. Nearly every role in the film, big and small, is played by some hugely talented comedic actor that I have loved in other things. The oohing and aahing of the audience starts when Jeffrey Tambor shows up as a narcissistic science fiction writer named Adam Shadowchild, and it never slows down from there. Probably the biggest role, other than the three main dudes, goes to Kristen Wiig’s Ruth. She is the girl that gets drug along for the trip. Initially she is skeptical of Paul and his British companions because of her strict religious upbringing. Surely Paul must be the devil and these two goofy worshippers of science Satanists. Eventually though, through the power of road trip bonding, she comes to love each of them to differing degrees, and by the end of the film is a permanent part of their crew. Wiig is funny and endearing in the role, both deftly playing the object of affection and dryly delivering killer lines like, “I’m sorry you got killed by my dad.” And it’s through her character that the script manages to hurl quite a bit of criticism towards religion and the religious. Really, it’s rather ballsy how fiercely this movie goes after God. I imagine there will be more than a couple devout audience members that come away from Paul offended, and if including this sort of material wasn’t a risk for Pegg and Frost when they were writing the script, then it certainly must have been for the studio who agreed to let them produce it as is. That’s one more point scored for interesting, non-homogenized filmmaking. I would much rather a movie offend a certain segment of people rather than keep it’s opinions to itself, and for this I commend Pegg, Frost, and everyone else that allowed Paul to be a film for atheists.
The content I had a little more trouble with was all of the filthy humor. The myriad references to the family films of the 80s that this movie throws at you one after another are at odds with the decidedly R rated nature of all of the humor. If I had to count the number of F bombs that get dropped in this movie, I would have gotten frustrated and gave up long before I made it all of the way through. Don’t get me wrong; there are some laughs to be had in the potty mouth and wiener jokes. But I don’t know that I laughed hard enough at this movie to justify the extent of the filthiness. After a while Paul began to sound like a twelve year old boy trying to impress his friends with cursing. As I sat through talk of alien balls and filthy sex acts and what have you, I couldn’t help but think that I would have been having more fun if this was all cleaned up and presented as something the whole family could watch together. I went into this movie giving it credit for the non-commercial line it drew in the sand, and now here I was wishing that it were more mainstream. What gives? Ultimately, I don’t feel like I was thrusting that expectation onto the film. It brought it upon itself by making me think about ET, by making me think about Back to the Future. All of the movies that Paul was a love letter to were movies that I watched as a kid. They are movies that I’d like to share with my own children some day. And here Paul is, talking about how great those cinematic classics are, but speaking only to a limited audience. It’s wallowing in nostalgia with slacker twenty and thirty somethings longing for a lost childhood instead of making new childhood memories for a younger generation. Is it fair to attack a movie for not being something else? Definitely not. But when it spends it’s entire runtime making you think about all of the things that it isn’t, really you can’t be blamed for it. As it is, Paul is content to build a house of vulgarity on a foundation of homage. That’s fine, and it’s entertaining enough, but I would have rather seen a film that builds new moments. I would have rather seem a film that’s homage worthy in its own right. The difference is the difference between Pegg and Frost’s first two film collaborations and some of the worst of Kevin Smith’s work. Shaun of the Dead makes you say, “hey, remember Shaun of the Dead?” Whereas, Paul makes you say, “hey, remember Steven Spielberg’s movies?” Decades later, I do remember Spielberg’s movies. But it won’t take me long to forget Paul.
