Screen Machine

Review: Hall Pass

Make no mistake – Hall Pass is a terrible comedy of the first order. Throughout the film we are subject to strained jokes about how men can’t control their sexual urges, women are shrews who despise sex, black men have over-sized penises and Asians have severe tempers and funny accents. My how politically incorrect! This is the world of the R-Rated Comedy, that contemporary genre in which anything, it seems, is possible – no joke is off bounds. Anything goes, no matter how scatological or smutty. But like so many other films of its ilk, its air of anarchy belies a highly conservative attitude towards the family institution.

Hall Pass begins with two men (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) given permission by their wives (Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate) to fulfil their carnal desires for other women, and ends with those men on their knees in submission to their wives, vowing to fulfil all their marital obligations. It’s a strange journey from freedom to fascism disguised as a coming-of-age tale wrapped up in a lot of poop jokes.

Let’s get a bit nostalgic for a moment here: What happened to the good old days of Caddyshack? At some point in the recent past, irreverent comedies stopped being irreverent, or, they became irrevent only at the level of style. A comedy is no longer merely an occasion to make some good jokes; it is now a platform for teaching us life lessons. Scan the Apatovian comedies of the past half-decade and you get a pretty good picture of what the ideal modern male should look like: He is monogamous but not too preachy about it (40 Year Old Virgin), he has a cultivated circle of male-only friends (I Love You, Man) and has maturely committed himself to a modest life as a salary man so that he can fulfil his family obligations (Knocked Up).

In Hall Pass this bourgeois bias rears its ugly head in a scene where Rick (Owen Wilson) pursues an attractive woman at his local café but finds resistance from the woman’s co-worker, a man whose clothes, musical taste and occupation supposedly signify that he is a “hipster”. After Rick is humiliated by his antagonist for not knowing the band Snow Patrol (a dead giveaway that what we’re dealing with is not a hipster but some corporate hack’s fantasy of a hipster), Rick in turn humiliates his aggressor with a speech about how when the hipster wastes all his parents’ money on his art film project, he will need to get a job from someone like Rick and Rick would never give a job to someone like the hipster! It’s a moment of reversal that is designed to have the audience on their feet cheering in solidarity with Rick but in fact only confirms the very narrowness of the filmmakers’ cinematic world.

In Hall Pass, comic anarchy sits side by side with moral certainty. We feel like the film can go in any direction in defiance of expectation. Yet at the same time, we know that at the end of the film the two men are going back to their wives. We should not think of this merely as a “contradiction” in the film. On the contrary, Hall Pass’ free, anything-goes type humour is structurally necessary for delivering its conservative message of family values. This theme is explicit in the narrative: the wives, threatened by their husbands’ desires for other women are encouraged by an older female friend to give their husbands a week off from marriage in order to strengthen their relationships. The idea is that in being given freedom, the men will not submit to the family unit because of a sense of duty; they will submit because they freely enjoy submitting, because submission is the natural order of things. As Zizek writes, “Duty becomes pleasure”. Or in other words, the ruling class grants freedom but only to ensure the continuance of the status quo and maintain their dominance. This theme is extremely relevant today. Just look at our immediate history. Isn’t it true that it’s the working classes in America enjoying political freedom who work hardest to maintain the interests of the superwealthy who exploit them? And conversely, it is only in the countries with brutal dictators that the working class seems to exercise real freedom and seems capable of exploding the order of things.

There is perhaps one good intentional joke in Hall Pass, and it’s a costuming joke: all the middle-aged males are perpetually dressed in over-sized short-sleeved shirts tucked in at the waist – a particularly funny symbol of the husbands’ emasculation. The horrifying underside to the joke? The film’s implication that the life such a uniform signifies is a life worth resigning one’s self to.

Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and has written for Senses of Cinema.

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