Rebound: THE WAY BACK

The Way Back is a character study in the structure of a sport’s movie. It's the kind of movie we say they don't make anymore, a terrific work of formula and feeling, and about recognizable people with real problems. In its attentive way, attuned to the addiction suffered by its main character, the film doubles up on underdogs. We find a man drawn to the beer bottle to drown out disappointments, purposefully narrowing his life to his hard work on a construction crew and his drunken nights passing out alone. Years before, he used to be a high school basketball star, and so when his old school calls him to take over as head coach of a team in the midst of a decades long losing streak — the old coach had a heart attack and has to withdraw midseason — he reluctantly agrees. It sets up an easy Hollywood arc, with a ragtag group of underperforming athletes and a middle-aged man gripped by regret and alcoholism have to help each other find a way forward, growing together and teaching each other. But though the film takes on that shape, through the hard-won victories on and off the court, it’s far more interested in the people involved. Though it hardly lacks for basketball action and locker room pep talks and heart to hearts with troubled youths, and builds up the typical compelling head of steam as rivals look down on them and the playoffs loom, the movie holds the coach in focus at the key moment, the scoreboard blurred in the background. In fact, though the ending is rousing and emotionally satisfying, as I sit here typing these words I can’t even remember if we hear the final score. Director Gavin O’Connor is no stranger to the genre, what with his great 2004 based-on-a-true-hockey-game Miracle and fine 2011 brother-versus-brother boxing movie Warrior. Here he and his team bring solid meat-and-potatoes studio craftsmanship to every polished moment of Brad Ingelsby’s sturdy screenplay. And he services the expected beats by underplaying them — scores revealed in a melancholy freeze frame of on-screen text, or a deft cut away from a reaction — while building up an involving emotional experience.

It helps that Ben Affleck, delivering one of his finest performances, is in the lead. He brings sad eyes to the role, unspoken depression burbling under his closeups. There’s a scene where he sits in his truck in the parking lot of a bar, and we can tell he’s debating whether or not to go in based solely on the expression on his face. It’s neither overplayed nor telegraphed; he’s simply being, letting the conflict play out naturally, subtly, a shift of weight, a tipping of emphasis, a silence, a pause. He feels real. So, too, is his physicality, carrying with it the full burden of his own star persona — here’s the champion who was, the box office draw and Oscar winner whose megawatt celebrity has been dimmed through the vagaries of gossip headlines and various personal problems playing out in public. We can see in his role the powerhouse this new coach once was, the sturdy confidence of his frame balancing on unsteady feet, tough and talented, but clearly struggling. When he steps back on the court, he regains some of his command. If only he can stay on the wagon long enough to take similar charge of his life. The cast around him is evocative, painted in broad strokes, enough to get the picture. There’s a kind assistant coach (Al Madrigal), a worried sister (Michaela Watkins), a tentative ex-wife (Janina Gavankar). As painful moments of backstory are revealed, it’s clear the man’s profound pain will not be taken away by drinking another shot at the bar nor by watching his players take a winning shot on the court. There are no simple answers here. No one — not him, not his players, not his family, not his community — is transformed overnight. But they can be set on the right path. It’s not for nothing that his day job finds him helping construct a new highway overpass. It’s slow going, piece by piece. But maybe, if all goes well, in the end, there’ll be a new way back.

Bet Your Life: THE HOUSE

We are at what one can only hope is the straggling tail end of the R-rated bad behavior comedy. The subgenre with such depressingly monotonous recent entries as Office Christmas Party, Fist Fight, and Snatched has become so predictable – shaggy improv roundabouts punctuated by truly nasty sight gags and corrosive worldviews wedded to extremely cynical sentimental self-actualization character arcs – that each new entry makes the days of Superbad or even Sisters seem so very far away. How often must we sit through the montages of consequence-free partying and destruction? This context might lead many to see what screenwriter Andrew Jay Cohen (of the more palatable Neighbors and Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates) is up to with The House, his directorial debut, as just another version of the same. But this brisk comedy about an in-over-their-heads middle-aged middle-class couple running an illegal small-town underground casino is doing something different, giving its raunchy ridiculousness a chance to escalate in concert with performers interested in doing more than cranking it up to eleven at the first chance. Sure, the movie has four-letter words, scenes of crowds drinking and fighting, and the requisite gross-out gags, but there’s a desperation to the characters’ energy, and a sharp societal commentary running through it. 

The trouble starts when a sweet married couple (Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler) faces down their impending empty nest with creeping terror. They don’t have enough money. Their daughter (Ryan Simpkins) is off to college, but, unknown to her, the scholarship they were counting on has fallen through. The folks vow to send her off right, and not break the bank on their shaky mortgage, despite weak-kneed moments. We’ve done everything right, Ferrell wails, confronted with his retirement account nonetheless turning up lighter than he’d thought (his 401k, for example, is several hundred thousand less than his assumption that it was an account with $401k in it) and the first bills for tuition rolling in. Enter their lovably sleazy friend (Jason Mantzoukas, stepping up to co-lead status after years of choice bit parts), a desperate divorced mope in need of financial pick-me-up himself, who proposes the off-the-books, under-the-table casino concept. Make four years of tuition in just a month off the backs of their craven neighbors’ gambling urges! It seems so simple at the start, but the movie smartly allows it to spiral out of control in logically wild ways, tying its economic anxiety and middle-class collapse to their tunnel-vision greed. Its thesis very well might be “capitalism: the cause of and solution to your problems.” By the time the couple have become kingpins of the backyard bacchanalia, equal parts pleasure and guilt, it’s clear that money may be a necessary evil. They lose track of their original goal as they plunge deeper into selfishness (a trait mirrored by the town’s equally crooked council members). 

I’m afraid that might make the movie sound like a screed, or a grating political commentary. No, what’s some sort of genius is the way this all follows from a blast of a comedy, springing up naturally from heightened absurdity rooted in character and situation. It’s hilarious moment to moment, its underlying thematic preoccupations carried off with the lightest of touches because it’s too busy with bouncy quips, brisk sight gags, unexpected line-readings, and a convincingly centered escalation. Ferrell and Poehler play the rare comedy married couple who are given equal billing and equal footing in the shenanigans. Driven by the desire to do right by their daughter and continue the illusion of financial security for their family, they are in complete lockstep, a perfect team. No time for phony divisions or false relationship crises. They’re too busy slowly but surely turning into slick suburban mobsters, self-styled untouchable underground small business owners. All the while they remain adorably committed to each other and to their plan, building each other up and egging each other on. Ferrell and Poehler have the relaxed manic energy of an old relationship enlivened by an exciting new project, a chemistry that feels real and true and sells the insanity to come.

What starts as neighbors around a poker table balloons into fight night, bars, DJs, pool service and more as an honest-to-goodness casino-in-miniature opens up like a dazzling Hellmouth under their cul-de-sac. Surrounded by a stellar supporting cast (a veritable who’s-who of comic character actors, including Nick Kroll, Rob Huebel, Lennon Parham, Cedric Yarbrough, Michaela Watkins, and more) who sell the good-natured raunch and escalating panic-inducing comic gross-outs. By the time sweet Ferrell has accidentally axed a low-level mobster’s finger off (and used a Croc in a flailing, futile attempt to stop the bleeding) and Poehler has fashioned a makeshift flamethrower to protect their investment, they’re not simply uproariously wild R-rated shocks, but a totally logical extension of the story’s good-natured cynicism. The lead characters are so sweet and loveable it’s worth a wild and wacky dive into the dark side to see them come face to face with their own greedy failings and rediscover what truly matters. 

It could have simply been pat family-first moralizing dressed up in goofy Breaking Bad-as-a-sitcom clothes, but the total commitment of its makers and leads elevate this into something special. The movie’s finale brings the strands together – family values colliding with small-town corruption in a mad-dash scramble to set things right. But it’s clear that just because this loveable family might be able to save themselves in the end, there remains something tenuous about the whole financial underpinnings of their world. It’s funny watching them flail – it’s the sort of comedy where it’s funny both cumulatively as obstacles pile up, and on a scene-by-scene basis as every glance, aside, and posture contributes to the pleasure – but there’s also a nervous laugh about how deeply messed up our culture’s financial priorities are. Turns out a casino economy is enough to drive a person crazy. The movie is an appealingly outlandish nervous tap-dance over the yawning chasm of distress that is modern America, an escalating desperation in the face of financial despair.

Lost in America: WANDERLUST

It’s not unusual to find a Hollywood comedy based on the assumption that harried big-city people would love a chance to enjoy a slower-paced lifestyle out in the country. The beauty of David Wain’s Wanderlust is that it takes that basic concept and twists it all around, making it a story of self-discovery through true personal experience rather than a superficial geographical shift. It features characters who are having a difficult time no matter where they go. They’re lost, searching for answers whether they know it or not. So it’s a comedy of personal crisis. But it’s also a comedy about society in some kind of crisis and, though there’s not too fine a point put on such ruminations, it’s ultimately a fairly sharp social satire. It not easy to become who you want to be in a society that offers up only easy, unsatisfying answers.

The movie stars Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston as George and Linda, a married couple who go through a sudden shift in employment status, forcing them to move out of New York City. On their way to stay in Atlanta with George’s brother (Ken Marino, who’s also the film’s co-writer) and wife (Michaela Watkins), they pull off the highway following GPS instructions towards a bed and breakfast.  This is Elysium, a hippie commune of free love, pot-smoking, tree-hugging, nudist outsiders. And you know what? It’s kind of nice. There’s a competitively mellow guy (Justin Theroux), a kindly but oblivious nudist author and wine-maker (Joe Lo Truglio), an angry hippie (Kathryn Hahn), and a gray-haired burnout (Alan Alda), among others. They have their peculiarities, but they seem to genuinely enjoy each other’s company and welcome newcomers with open arms.

But, the next morning, George and Linda eventually make it to Atlanta, where they find a surly nephew, a blustering brother, and a perpetually drunk sister-in-law who one day declares her intentions to apply for a Real Housewives spin-off. It’s a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption and overworked callousness. The couple bounces back to Elysium, where they find that their first positive experience is not easily recreated when staying there on a maybe-permanent basis. The film takes tired stereotypes – the materialistic bourgeoisie and the off-the-grid tree-huggers – and injects them with an energy and a wit that help them skip around potentially exasperating thinness. I mean, how many movies have you seen in which a square city dweller goes on an accidental drug trip? Here, it’s funny all over again.

It helps that the performances are uniformly so very funny. Rudd has such a sweet, easy-going surliness that even when he improvises lines of stunning filthiness, he seems to be a man trying out uncomfortable personas for himself. As he casts about for a new purpose in life, he finds himself getting increasingly distraught at the lack of easy answers even as everyone around him seems to have them. Meanwhile, Aniston throws herself into her role with such an incredible commitment and skill that I found myself taken aback. I’ve never been much of an Aniston fan; to me, she’s been capable at best. I’m reminded of Ebert’s line about her being upstaged even in scenes by herself. But here, she does her best work, a complex and hilarious performance that bounces off of the various personalities in the film in ways that match Rudd in tone and effect note for note. They bring their characters to vivid, hilarious life. These are two people in desperate need of something that they can’t even explain: a place and a purpose. They’ll know it when they see it.

David Wain films are about odd groups, makeshift communities forming on the margins of society. There are the Elysium hippies here, but similar kindred spirits can be found in the summer camp of his cult favorite Wet Hot American Summer and the troubled-kids mentorship program and the Live Action Role Playing of Role Models (one of the funniest movies of recent memory). These are films in which collections of weirdoes find reason to congregate and reasons to genuinely like and care for each other. Somehow Wain pulls off a tricky feat, getting big laughs out of these characters’ eccentricities and then still managing to find the genuine warmth and humanity within the group dynamic. There’s genuine human interest here. By the end, you just care about them and want to see them all end up happy, and that’s what makes the laughs worthwhile.