It’s idiotic on purpose and will make you stupid with laughter
It’s not often that you can use the word “silly” to describe a movie, but when you can, you might be talking about something special, something inspired. I don’t mean a movie that embarrasses itself by making a complete hash of its subject, causing you to roll your eyes and shake your head. I mean a movie that wants to be silly and still hold your attention and entertain you. It’s a fiendishly tough thing to pull off. A deliberately silly movie is a high-wire act. It has to evoke the real world to get us involved in the story it’s telling and then create its own bonkers reality—and once it does so, it needs to keep topping itself in the silliness department because otherwise it will run out of gas.
The early Marx Brothers movies were exercises in sustained silliness. The In-Laws (my favorite American comedy) is about a completely normal guy who finds himself getting involved with a total lunatic and ends up as a result in front of a firing squad in a banana republic run by another lunatic who has conversations with a face he’s drawn on his hand (if you’re old enough, you’ll know what I mean when I say it’s Señor Wences).
And then, of course, there is the unparalleled champion of the silly movie, Airplane!, the picture with a thousand absurd jokes, in which (just to take a throwaway moment) a transplant surgeon at the Mayo Clinic is sitting in front of a bookcase filled with jars of Hellmann’s while a disembodied heart jumps around on his desk.
There have been precious few silly movies in recent years. The best of them, 2021’s Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, is a Kristen Wiig vehicle about two small-town friends who end up at the wrong motel in Florida, run afoul of a global villainess, have a fight over a himbo, meet Tommy Bahama, and are saved from doom by a water sprite played by Reba McEntire. It was glorious. Nobody saw it, though COVID had a lot to do with that.
So my challenge to you is actually a favor to you. Go see Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. It opens this weekend. It sustains its silliness for 93 wonderful minutes and, like all such jaunts, it will go anywhere and do anything. Like all great silly movies—think There’s Something About Mary—Gail Daughtry actually has a plot that’s easy to summarize in conventional terms. For example: There’s Something About Mary is nominally about a man still in love with his high-school crush who hires a private detective to track her down, whereupon the P.I. falls for her too and a romantic triangle ensues. It is on this conventional structure that the Farrelly Brothers stapled and hung and tied bits and jokes and situations and routines that grew ever more absurd and hilarious.
Gail Daughtry is about a content small-town Kansas girl who is on the verge of marrying her high school sweetheart when she discovers him with another woman—and determines to have a last fling herself before marriage. Pretty simple romcom premise, right? Yes—but no. The complication here is that her fiancé has his moment with a famous person (I won’t say who) after he and Gail have a conversation about which star they would have to excuse their beloved for straying with. Hers is Jon Hamm, and she determines to fly to Los Angeles to find him and use her “celebrity sex pass” with him.
At this point, the movie turns into a demented takeoff on The Wizard of Oz in which our heroine is Dorothy (remember, in that movie, Dorothy’s last name is Gale—Gail, get it?). The scarecrow is her partner in the town hair salon. The tin man is a disgraced paparazzo whose career was ruined when he was unable to get a photo of Hamm decades earlier. And the lion is the actor John Slattery, who costarred with Hamm on Mad Men and now lives in a garage in East L.A. where he shadow-boxes and spends his time writing Hamm desperate texts seeking to be his friend. They set off to find Hamm, whose Oz is the Chateau Marmont Hotel off Sunset Boulevard. They are all being pursued by a wicked witch—an Italian woman with unlimited resources who is trying to bring down the world financial system.
That’s all I’m going to tell you, except to say that Slattery is hilarious, cowriter Ken Marino plays the paparazzo with demented grace, Hamm does a wonderful and self-effacing turn as his worst self, and what can I say of Zoey Deutch? She is Gail, and like Cameron Diaz in There’s Something About Mary, she is a character you absolutely have to fall in love with if the movie is going to work at all. Deutch, who just delivered a beautiful and funny performance in a Netflix romcom-tearjerker called Voicemails for Isabelle, is absolutely incandescent here. She grounds the movie in something real before joining in the full-throttle lunacy.
Marino wrote the movie with the director David Wain; they’ve been working together for a quarter century since they made the summer-camp-movie parody Wet Hot American Summer together. That was a silly movie with a great premise that doesn’t quite work because it’s weirdly sloppy and visually amateurish. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is Wain’s seventh film, and he has achieved the command he lacked in 2001 when it comes to look and feel and pacing. What he has produced is a screamingly funny movie that doesn’t have an idea in its head. I can’t tell you how happy I was to sit in the dark with a laughing crowd and be stupid for 93 minutes.
John Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary and the Washington Free Beacon’s movie critic.
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