From its very beginning to its very end, The Sitter is sonically alive. It has a soundtrack full of excellent hip hop tracks including artists like Slick Rick, Pharcyde, The Sugarhill Gang, and Biz Markie. Giving this one a watch serves as a reminder that there was a time when hip hop was an up and coming art form being brought to prominence through the creations of inspired young musicians and not a boated, lazy cash cow like it is today, where artists cynically throw out an easy hook and then sit back to wait for the checks to start rolling in. My favorite aspect of The Sitter, by far, was its classic hip hop soundtrack and the energy that it brought to the proceedings. And that’s a huge problem. Was there really nothing else this movie had to offer more appealing than a chance to hear some of my favorite old jams? Unfortunately, no. I could almost believe that making The Sitter was an excuse for David Gordon Green to put together an awesome soundtrack and nothing more.
The Sitter is a quest movie, much in the vane of the similar though sweeter Adventures in Babysitting, or perhaps for a more modern reference, the Harold and Kumar movies. Our main character is an unemployed loaf of a young man named Noah (Jonah Hill) who has been roped into babysitting the neighbor’s kids. This all goes awry when his user of a non-girlfriend Marisa (Ari Graynor), calls him up and promises intercourse if he meets her at a house party with some coke (up until this point she’s only let him sniff around her crotch a bit, with no crotch sniffing reciprocation). Needless to say, Noah jumps at the opportunity, which leads to a series of misadventures involving drug deals, stolen mini-vans, exploding bathrooms, gang fights, and what have you; all with the kids in tow. That Noah is a very bad babysitter can go unsaid, what The Sitter hopes is that Noah is such a stupendously bad babysitter that watching him fumble and fail at the task will be both hilarious and engaging. It never quite gets there. While I will admit that I got a good number of laughs out of this thing, a couple chuckles and a few good songs weren’t enough to prop up all of the awful that came along for the ride.
This is probably one of the dumbest comedies I’ve seen in a long time. The fact that it’s kind of funny kept it from being an unpleasant experience, but after a while I found it grating how little screenwriters Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka attempted to have anything that happens over the course of the film make sense or resonate. Big things happen in this movie, automobiles are destroyed, people are shot at, infidelities are committed; but none of it is treated with any gravity. None of the choices the characters make have any consequences. If the events of this film took place in the real world, the big ending would be Noah being imprisoned; but instead we leave him self-actualized and optimistic. The crimes that Noah commits and the destruction that he and the children cause might have been acceptable if this had all taken place in a movie that was completely farcical, that took place in a world unlike our own, but The Sitter is presented with a generally realist tone. The only reason there aren’t any consequences to these characters’ actions is that the movie we’re watching is too lazy to deal with them. It wants to create big jokes, but it doesn’t want to handle the repercussions of having its characters perform drastic deeds. Because of this, The Sitter comes off as uninterested in being a real movie. It’s just a slapped together series of gags; and that’s kind of insulting.
Jonah Hill isn’t very well cast in the lead. Or, actually, maybe he’s fine for the lead. Maybe the screenwriters just didn’t know who the lead was. Either way, there’s something going on here that doesn’t work. When Noah is first introduced to us he is slovenly and pathetic. He has no job, no car, he still lives with his mother, and he appears to think of little other than himself. This lasts for about ten minutes. Then he’s suddenly the nicest guy in the world, helping his mother jumpstart her personal life, showing interest in scientific pursuits, teaching strange children lessons about life. Well, which is it? Is this guy a jerk who you wouldn’t want babysitting your kids, or is he actually a really great dude? It’s like the team behind this one came up with the premise of the film, but then had no idea how to write a movie about an unlikable protagonist, so they just settled for a muddled character that doesn’t make any sense on the page. I’m not even going to get into how unbelievable it is that the Noah character is constantly impressing people with how street he is and how he randomly inspires girls way more attractive that he is (Kylie Bunbury) to approach him and ask him out; that might give me a headache. All that stuff does serve as decent support for the Hill being miscast theory though. He’s a funny guy, for sure, but a thug with street cred and a slick ladies man he’s not. What kind of story were they trying to tell with this Noah character? How could they have better defined his personality and showed him to grow and change over the course of the film? These are the sorts of questions that needed to be asked before this script went through a couple more re-writes. Then maybe we would have been left with a movie worth filming.
The crew of kids that get toted around were all pretty fun and well cast, however, and they ended up being one of the things that saved this movie from being a failure. Landry Bender plays Blithe, an 8-year-old who’s obsessed with celebrity gossip and club culture, and while her character isn’t the most original conceptually, she’s very natural in the role. I got a few laughs out of her mini-socialite act and it was because she was able to deliver things with good comedic timing, not just because of the novelty of hearing a little kid say grown up things. Kevin Hernandez is legitimately creepy as Rodrigo, the adopted child who pairs seemingly homicidal urges with a never ending supply of explosives. This is one little kid I wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley (unless I had a couple guys backing me up, then we’d give that kid a real beating). Max Records gets stuck with the lamest character. Instead of being big, loud, and entertaining like the other kids, his Slater is more of a neurotic nancy. He does okay with the role though. With all of the whining he does, Slater could have gotten annoying real fast, but Records always keeps him relatable.
The other supporting roles were hit or miss. Ari Graynor was amazing as Marisa, Noah’s non-girlfriend who exploits him for her own selfish needs. While her character was a thoughtless girl with the volume turned up to 11 more so than she was a real representation of a bad girlfriend, there was something just so authentic about her performance that it made me shudder. I have had this self-obsessed woman in my life before, and watching Graynor work her magic had all sorts of bad memories flooding back. Sam Rockwell appears as the villain of the piece, a creepy drug dealer with boundary issues named Karl. He’s kind of funny in the role, but most of the humor of the Karl character comes from the ridiculous things happening in the background of his drug lair, and I couldn’t help but feel like doing something this farcical was a waste of a talent on the level of Rockwell. Similarly, JB Smoove shows up as Karl’s right hand man, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie do such a poor job of exploiting his comedic talents. Usually he steals everything he shows up in, but in this one he’s not good for so much as a single chuckle. Probably that has something to do with the fact that he wasn’t given anything to work with other than a scene where his crotch was in flames.
Really, there was a narrative of disappointment running through the entirety of my The Sitter experience. Once upon a time David Gordon Green was one of the new filmmakers that I was most excited about, period. With films like All the Real Girls and Snow Angels he was making challenging, thoughtful character pieces that exhibited quite the flair for visual filmmaking as well. But ever since he’s turned to making straight comedies he’s gone from making important works of art to polishing turds. Pineapple Express was funny enough, and it was kind of novel watching an indie filmmaker turn to broad comedy there, but Your Highness was so bad it was near unwatchable. The only way The Sitter could be viewed as anything other than a disappointment is when you factor in that at least it wasn’t another soul sucking void of unfunny like Your Highness. Is that enough to give it a pass though? Back when Green was writing his own scripts he was a respected artist on the rise, and ever since he’s started directing other people’s stuff he’s looked like a sellout slumming it in the comedy genre. If he switched over to making comedies that were innovative and hysterical it would be one thing, but to go from something as powerful as Snow Angels to something as trite and lazy as this in just three films is unacceptable. It’s about time Green gets his act together and starts taking himself seriously again, or I imagine myself and many others will have no trouble ignoring his work from this point forward.
