Observe and Report

(Based on the trailer for this film, I expected to write about masculinity and suburbia.  However, after watching it I want to mention some other thoughts, though I may return to those ideas later.)

 

(If you’d like a summary, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observe_and_Report.  I’m going to skip that for now.)

 

There’s a scene in Observe and Report when Ronnie, played by Seth Rogan, finds out he isn’t getting into the police academy.  Ronnie’s arch nemesis, a local detective played by Ray Liotta, is the one to deliver the news.  Anticipating a humorous exchange between Ronnie and the detective, another cop hides in a storage closet to listen to the rejection.  However, about halfway through he comes out, saying he thought the rejection was going to be funny but that it was really just kind of sad. 

 

The scene is a kind of microcosm of the movie as a whole.  I thought it would be fun, but instead it was just kind of sad.  Also, it was violent, racist, misogynistic, and ultimately pornographic.

 

Before I get to the problems, let me point out the good stuff, of which there is plenty.  I don’t think that an offensive film—one that endorses alarming things—has to be unenjoyable to watch, and Observe and Report is a good example of that.  Seth Rogan, as usual, portrays his character with a usual dose of endearing loser-hood.  Collette Wolfe also manages to squeeze an affective performance out of comparatively few scenes.  Besides acting, some of the violence (mostly whenever it wasn’t directed toward people, like at the firing range), is humorous.  

 

After the beginning, however, the movie goes downhill by not going anywhere.  Ronnie is a racist, misogynist bully at the start and the problem is that by the end of the film he’s more of a racist, misogynist bully.  For example, he initially wants to get Faris’ Brandi to sleep with him.  He succeeds, but what later turns him against her is the fact that she then sleeps with Liotta’s detective.  He doesn’t reject her because he realizes that women should be respected, or that relationships are more than sex with beautiful people.  Instead he couldn’t possess her, as an object, in the way he wanted.  Moreover, despite Brandi’s alcoholism and apparent drug use, I don’t think it would be impossible to read her character as a sexually empowered female (albeit a problematized one), and Rogan’s character as an imperializing male determined to undermine her freedom.  Whether you agree with such a reading or not, by the end of the film Ronnie hasn’t changed much.  He’s with another woman, but assures a reporter that he will get that woman to break her oath of chastity.  Regardless of how deep we want to read these exchanges, its clear that Ronnie never learns that people are more than objects.  (The film has received particular criticism for its depiction of date rape.  You can read more here: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/actnow/425959 as well as on Wikipedia.)

 

The film includes similar treatments of race and violence and in each case I started off hopeful.  The way these issues were portrayed was extreme and offensive, which made me expect that by the end we’d see some sort of turnaround, or a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement that it’s not okay to be a racist/violent/a misogynist.  Really, I would have been happy if there was anything to suggest that violence might not always be the solution and people are more than stereotypes.  That never happen.  Instead everyone was a stereotype (from Nell, the born-again Christian, to Ronnie’s mom, another one of the film’s alcoholics), and most of the time—as Laura observed afterward—the filmmakers seemed to be laughing at the ridiculous scenes they could put their characters through instead of allowing them to experience anything meaningful.  

 

In the end, I would describe the film as pornographic because while its all very stimulating, there’s seems to be no real point beyond face-value stimulation.  I’m not talking about sex when I say pornographic.  In fact, that was some of the tamer material (probably well within the PG 13 range).  However, other issues do become more like porn than cinema.  For example, when Ronnie is forced to confront an entire squad of police officers he beats them with a Maglite, confronts Liotta’s detective, and is subsequently battered to a bloody pulp.  If the whole scene is designed to remind us of other climatic cinema battles, that allusion doesn’t do much but point out how cool it is to have violence on film.   

 

Another good example is when Ronnie confronts a kiosk worker.  The worker (at least according to Ronnie) is of Middle Eastern decent and has suffered a long history of abuse from Ronnie (which is one of the many things making Ronnie less endearing and is another recurring problem).  Near the beginning of the film the two characters have an argument that ends in them saying “Fuck You” over and over and over again.  While I don’t really care what language is in a film, I’m also not sure why this was funny.  It dragged on and on, killing the film’s timing and, with each iteration, making Ronnie less and less appealing.  Also, I kept wondering if this kind of thing is really still funny?  Haven’t we seen it already?  Many times?  In better films?  Maybe I’m getting caught up in the fact that I almost universally sympathized with the film’s “bad guys,” but this scene seemed pornographic in the way that empty extremes of any kind are pornographic when they have no apparent value other than to be extreme.  Profanity seems to work better when it blends into the fabric of the film, providing depth and personality to characters and situations.  I can’t figure out what highlighting it does, except maybe excite twelve year-olds who are still scandalized whenever they hear a naught word. 

 

Ultimately, Observe and Report is a film of extremes that don’t do anything interesting.  The corpus of other Rogan films demonstrates that extremes can be entertaining, insightful, and occasionally profound.  I loved Superbad, for example, and Knocked Up was both a pleasure and viscerally communicative.  Observe and Report, on the other hand, starts off strong but spends its entire duration in atrophy.  If it teaches anything its that there is a fine line between porn and art and that those films that become art are more than the sum of their respective parts.