Pipe Dreams

[August 6th, 2008]

As Judd Apatow and his friends have completed the metamorphosis from Freaks and Geeks underdogs to box-office big men on campus, their virtues—snappy improvisation, ethical seriousness and a keen understanding of male vulnerability—have been obscured by their flaws. At the release of Knocked Up, critics detected a sour streak of resentment toward women, while others noticed in Superbad a dismissive anti-intellectualism. Then there’s the gang’s apparent unconcern with cinematography: Forgetting Sarah Marshall had all of Hawaii for a backdrop, but I defy you to remember any vista other than Jason Segal’s flopping penis. In short, the Apatow gang has a problem with beauty. It’s as if Judd and his pals, locked out of the clique of gorgeous people by their own gangling, chubby physiques, have taken a sulky revenge by remaining indifferent or actively hostile to aesthetics. If girls, books and cameras don’t want them, fine: Girls, books and cameras are a load of crap.

I suspect this bitterness is going to be an enduring pathology for the Apatowheads, but the hiring of David Gordon Green to direct Pineapple Express is a tremendous first step toward healing. Green cut his teeth helming two of the most tender independent films of the ’90s, George Washington and All the Real Girls, and all four of his movies carry an elegiac mood, as if recalling a long-ago late afternoon that always remains just out of reach. Pineapple Express is a wholly different animal—an affectionate send-up of schlocky ’80s action flicks, it’s the most deliriously funny Apatow production since Superbad—but the biggest surprise is how much of Green’s signature mood he’s managed to sneak in. The movie is packed with car crashes and gunfire (and a severed ear), but it floats along in a dreamy, innocent haze, like a buddy picture reenacted in suburban backyards: Son of Tango & Cash.

It helps that most of the fog is filled with THC. Weed is, of course, the habitual drug of clowning: It slows people down, helps them see and do ridiculous things, and has no lasting ill effects—unlike alcohol, which heightens emotion, provokes unwanted honesty and ushers in the inevitable hangover. (Life is a tragedy to those who drink, and a comedy to those who smoke.) More than any stoner-movie director in recent memory, Green utilizes marijuana’s erasure of consequences: He’s made a film in which absurd events abound, starring characters who don’t quite notice.

Dale Denton (Seth Rogen, who also co-wrote the script) is a process server in a shabby suit, who witnesses a drug-cartel murder and flees the scene as conspicuously as possible, leaving behind a half-smoked joint (the artisanal weed of the title) that implicates him and his dealer, Saul Silver (James Franco). The duo go on the lam, though they’re not sure where to run; Saul’s suggested destinations are “nowhere and Quiznos.” This plan is a hilarious non sequitur, as is just about every event in Pineapple Express. The jokes are made exponentially funnier by the addled reactions of the heroes—especially Danny McBride as an indestructible lowlife and Franco, who reveals previously unsuggested brilliance as a deadbeat with delusions of profundity.

These aspirations—Saul wants to be a civil engineer, and he’s memorized the work of famous architects—are the heart of Pineapple Express, and they hint, finally, at a shift in the Apatow company’s feelings about beauty. Saul’s artistic dreams, however hopeless, aren’t mocked by the movie, but seen as suggestions of something better in him—just as David Gordon Green hints at his own love of Terrence Malick by pausing from the mayhem to film Dale and Saul playing leapfrog in a sun-dappled forest. There’s no reason why that scene has to be there, except that the director and the characters—and yes, even their producer, Apatow himself—are letting down their guard long enough to enjoy something lovely. Maybe it’s just the weed. But I’m hoping the mellow lasts.