NBC’s modern Thursday night lineup has done a lot to revive the art of the sitcom, which ten years ago appeared to be on it’s last legs. A huge part of that was due to the American version of The Office finding an audience and creating a blueprint for how a more film-like, shot on location, one-camera sitcom production could be the successor to the soundstage produced, three camera sitcoms that had begun to feel so stale and corny. The show really found its legs commercially when paired with multi-time Emmy nominated 30 Rock; a show that felt more modern and intellectual than the others left on network television, similar to The Office. What makes all of this relevant, of course, is that this film’s stars, Steve Carell and Tina Fey, are the faces of those revolutionary sitcoms, and consequently huge forces in modern comedy. They’ve both had some notable success when transitioning over to the film world already, but this is the first time that they’ve been paired up for a project. That bit of comedy history alone should have been enough to sell me on going to see Date Night, but when you also factor in that the film was helmed by Shawn Levy, the director responsible for the awful Night at the Museum series, I began to get a bit more skeptical.
Carell and Fey play a long married suburban couple named the Fosters who have become troubled with how lame it is to be suburban and married. Too wore out by work and kids to enjoy the feeble amount of free time that they get at the end of the day, they usually just stare at each other tired eyed across a table at the local steakhouse. And they aren’t even indulgent enough to order the steak. When one of the couples in their social circle announces that they are splitting up, a question surfaces: should we really be living like this? Is this living at all? So, in an attempt at injecting a little more spark and energy into their humdrums, the duo ventures out to the big city to have a date night at a posh restaurant out of their price range and too hip for them to gain entrance to. The latter problem they take care of by stealing a reservation from a no-show couple named the Triplehorns, but when a couple of Mafioso enforcer types (Common & Jimmi Simpson) show up at their table mistaking them for said couple, they begin to regret their decision. How these thugs were able to find “the Triplehorns” based on a restaurant reservation was never something I grasped. I suppose their plan must have been to drive around to every restaurant in the city and ask the maître d’ if they had a reservation for the Triplehorns on their list. I can’t imagine how many times they must have struck out until they finally scored here. This is where stupidity begins to seep into the film. And it seeps in quick.
I came into this film with a lot of goodwill. In today’s world of production line, corporate filmmaking I really appreciated that Levy bothered to hire a couple of legitimately funny people to star in his romantic comedy rather than hiring a couple of pretty people and then trying to make them be funny. If this film had been another Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey vehicle I would have came into it with bile in my throat. That it turns out to be just as stupid as anything those two have been involved with is unfortunate. Bottom line, Tina Fey and Steve Carell are much too good to be in this movie, and I don’t know what they’re doing here. They are both actors with strong senses of rhythm and comedic timing, and there are times where their back and forth exchanges make the film work, but on the whole these moments are spaced too far apart to mean much. The dialogue is littered with little asides that absolutely cracked me up. The problem is, whenever the two main characters weren’t riffing, things got so bad that I was embarrassed for everyone involved while sitting through it. A blooper reel that played over the credits revealed that Fey and Carell did a lot of improvising. This explained the extreme unevenness of the film for me, as I can only imagine that anything I laughed at came from their experimenting around on set and wasn’t evident in the original screenplay. The development of the plot and the dramatic moments are so ineffectively crafted and amateur that they look absurd when sat next to effective comedy. And the big comedic set pieces, like a couple of dorks having to do pole dances, looked so completely low brow and obvious when next to brief glimpses of sharp satire, like when the Foster’s tried to disguise themselves as snarky New York socialites to regain entrance into the restaurant, that I imagined there must have been multiple people involved in the screenwriting process. There wasn’t. The screenplay is credited to one lone author, Josh Klausner, who also wrote Shrek the Third. What we have here is a clear case of two funny people in a bad movie.
But, despite the fact that the leads were able to elevate the humor of the film, they weren’t able to come close to doing as much for the dramatic moments. Any time somebody launched into a heartfelt speech or we were supposed to buy into the characters being in any sort of real danger the film came to a screeching halt. Carell has shown real dramatic chops in previous efforts like Little Miss Sunshine and The Forty Year Old Virgin. Fey hasn’t had a chance to show us as much dramatically, but I don’t remember her ever taking me out of the film when handling the more serious moments of something like Baby Mama. Despite this, they’re both horrible here. Anytime they’re being anything other than funny they look like deer in headlights; completely out of their element. It’s true that the story developments they’re trying to sell, that of mundane suburbanites getting swept up into organized crime and espionage, are poorly written, and the dialogue they’re made to speak is clunky and horrible, but they weren’t able to do anything to get me more involved in the film than I should have been. Good performances would have. Due to their track records of being acceptable to good in their previous films, I can’t help but lay most of the blame at the feet of the director. Levy’s previous comedies, A Night at the Museum, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Just Married are all slapstick, mainstream-aimed fluff that plays to the lowest common denominator of humor, and that’s exactly what I saw here. That two actors who are known for smarter humor than this would involve themselves in something so, well… bad, can’t be seen as anything other than a disappointment. Especially from Fey, who has proven herself to be a talented screenwriter/creator of content in her own right time and time again. Did somebody call in a serious favor to get this movie made with these actors, or was the paycheck really just that good?
That’s not to say that Carell and Fey riffing was the only bright spot of the film; there were a couple of supporting roles worth mentioning as well. James Franco and Mila Kunis had a brief appearance as the couple whose reservation the Foster’s stole, and they play the roles so unabashedly white trash that they were probably the highlight of the movie for me. The way they took such broad caricatures of criminal hillbillies and played them completely serious really struck a chord (and a funnybone?) with me. Franco, especially, is able to take a huge mouthful of ultra dramatic dialogue and deliver it so stone cold straight faced while decked out in flannel, ratty facial hair, and fake tattoos that I was wishing the movie was more about him and less about the Fosters. There’s a car chase sequence somewhere toward the end of the second act that feels completely out of place and ridiculous, but it involves a turn from Curb Your Enthusiasm’s JB Smoove as a bewildered cabby that was too much fun for me to get upset about. Unlike Kunis and Franco’s more method approach to their out there characters, Smoove takes a more theatrical approach to dealing with less than stellar material and really shouts at the rafters. The results are, perhaps equally, hilarious and I can’t help but wish that Fey and Carell had taken one of these two approaches when crafting their characters. In my experience there are two ways that an actor can elevate substandard material; by either taking it so serious that it takes on a mock dramatic effect, or by embracing it’s low quality and going just as hammy and loud with your performance as a sort of meta exercise. Fey and Carell do neither, playing things in a middle of the road manner, and it makes the bulk of the film look just as bad as it must have on the page. Also worth mentioning is Mark Wahlberg playing a chiseled, charming, ex military/black ops type that helps the Fosters along on their adventure. The joke is that he is so impossibly capable, and his life is so impossibly awesome; and while it’s funny at first, it eventually wears out it’s welcome. By about the third time Carell mentions that Wahlberg’s character never wears a shirt, all of the laughs had already been milked out of the situation for me. And while Wahlberg does well enough in the role, I can’t help but feel that the joke would have been more effective had the aforementioned Matthew McConaughey been the one to play the character. It felt like it was written for McConaughey and they had to settle for Wahlberg as a second choice when he wasn’t available, because he used to be known for being shirtless a long time ago as well. With McConaughey they would have been riffing on a more modern meme, as Wahlberg has moved past such things and I can’t imagine a large portion of the audience even remembers his Funky Bunch days.
Other than these few humorous performances, however, I can’t stress enough how poorly constructed this film is overall. If there is any doubt as to the lack of talent (or perhaps motivation?) of the filmmakers, I challenge you to look at the music choices for the soundtrack. Each song included is so head scratchingly simple and obvious that I can’t describe the soundtrack using any word other than tacky. It was probably at the point that the same wacky song, ‘Cobrastyle’, that was used in Epic freaking Movie played over the wacky car chase that I lost all hope for this being anything other than a train wreck. What this film needed, more than anything else, was someone with some taste and sensibility rewriting the script and sitting behind the camera. Date Night made me laugh too hard and too frequently to say that it’s a bad film exactly, but everything else about it is so off putting and bad that I can’t come close to saying that it’s a good film either.
