He's mean! Har, har, har. He's racist! Har, har, har. He's so politically incorrect! Har, har, har.
There's a new breed of comedy, the bad boy comedy - or is it bad bro comedy? - and Jason Bateman has chosen one, Bad Words, as his directorial debut. The point of these things I think is to have characters saying and doing things that are outrageous and that press upon social convention. The angle is that these anti-social jerks are actually the protagonists that we're supposed to root for. We're supposed to find the underlying humanity in these cads; to see their behavior as the product of their wounds, not the product of their sociopathy. And often these anti-heroes are white men, raging most frequently against the women and the people of color around them (or the other white men that simply aren't masculine enough for their tastes).
The above is a synopsis of the plot of Bad Words as much as it is a critique of this recent sub-genre. More specifically, Bateman plays Guy Trilby, a 40 year old asshole and bully (but we're assured he's just a neglected super-genius!) that finds a loophole in spelling bee rules that allows him to compete with 10 year olds. For reasons Bateman and writer Andrew Dodge repeatedly assure us will be revealed, Guy is out to put a torch to this national spelling bee. He's trailed by a reporter and his sex object, played by Kathryn Hahn.
Hahn's there basically to represent the archetype of the self-loathing female. Allison Janney is the mean authority figure there to serve as the butt of lesbian jokes and to get her comeuppance from another guy she's mean to. Rachael Harris shows up as a dowdy mother to serve as the butt of jokes about her vagina. Hahn, Janney, and Harris, under-utilized as they may be, are charismatic enough to provide some human dimension to these characters, regardless of the film's distaste for them.
Guy's the villain here, but the filmmakers don't want us to see it that way. So they introduce a lonely kid and fellow contestant who tries desperately to befriend Guy, and, for reasons unknown, Guy reciprocates and feeds his new 10 year old companion shots of liquor and hires a prostitute (named Marzipan, har, har, har) to flash the kid. What a guy. Guy's penchant for buying a 10 year old kid porn and liquor is creepy, in a Bicycle Man way, but the film doesn't want to address that, so it locates its innocence on that point.
If you think anything I've written above represents the greatest sins of this film, I'm sorry to say that it actually commits the two greatest sins of the bad boy comedy: it punctures nothing, and it isn't funny. None of the humor or anti-social behavior manages to lacerate anything about society or how people relate to each other. It just makes Guy look like a racist jerk taking out his pain on 10 year old children. Finding creative ways to racially insult a 10 year old Indian kid gets old real quick, especially when you realize that the movie really doesn't aspire to anything more than thinking it's funny to call a child from Cleveland "slumdog" because he's of Indian descent. It's comedy based on saying bad words and nothing else. Also perhaps twisted wish fulfillment in a way - "I wish I could say all the horrible things I think and get away with it."
Everyone involved in this one needs to go back and do some more studying. Perhaps check out the work of current comedic top dog Louis C.K., who manages to poke at societal convention and work around taboos in a manner that actually provides an interesting commentary on, well, societal convention and taboo. C.K. doesn't just stand up on stage, throw out an epithet, and then expect everyone to laugh just because he's been a very, very bad boy. Or imagine George Carlin reading a list of 7 dirty words and then saying nothing else about them. Unfortunately, that is exactly what Bateman and Dodge try with Bad Words, and that makes for ninety surprisingly humorless, insight-free minutes.
Screened in the theater.
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