HALL PASS directed by Peter and Bobby Farrelly, written by the Farrellys, Pete Jones and Kevin Barnett from a story by Jones, with Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis, Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate. A Warner Bros release. 105 minutes. Opens Friday (February 25). For venues, trailers, and times, see Movies.
Bobby Farrelly hasn’t asked me what I think of his new movie, and I’ve been courteous enough not to tell him.
I wonder if he’s used to that. After perfecting the gross-out comedy with Dumb & Dumber, Kingpin and the blockbuster There’s Something About Mary, he and his brother, Peter, have spent the last decade struggling to make another smash.
Okay, Shallow Hal and Stuck On You have their moments, but the other films – Me, Myself & Irene, Fever Pitch, The Heartbreak Kid – were dead on arrival, their weak stories further undermined by the brothers’ habit of packing their casts with non-actor pals and a certain inattention to the technical demands of lighting and editing.
Their new film, Hall Pass, attempts to apply their distinct formula of scatological humour, ritual humiliation and cartoonish unreality to a midlife-crisis comedy about two suburban husbands (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) whose wives give them a week’s leave to venture outside of their marriage beds.
“Pete and I are both married guys,” Farrelly says. “So we definitely relate to these two guys.”
Of course, it’s unlikely that either Peter or Bobby has ever been caught masturbating in a minivan, as happens to Sudeikis in one of the movie’s set pieces.
“You know,” Farrelly says, “we’re very conscious to make sure that beneath the gags and all that there is a good story with a moral. And I think it’s there. In the end, people have had character arcs, and they come back and they’ve learned a lesson, in a very bizarre way.”
Hall Pass feels like an attempt to reclaim ground the Farrellys ceded recently to Judd Apatow, whose productions have landed huge audiences by mixing extreme comedy with more grounded love stories. But Apatow’s pictures tend to be about younger characters, while the Farrellys are skewing older. Hall Pass makes their new perspective particularly obvious in a sneering, atonal scene in which Wilson’s character dresses down a hipster barista (Derek Waters) by explaining that someday he’ll need to apply for a real job and squares like Wilson will be the people doing the hiring.
“We all know that kid, that young guy who’s hipper than us,” Farrelly says. “My brother and I are those two guys, we’re not that young kid. Maybe in Apatow’s world he’s that young kid – I don’t know.”
The Farrellys’ next project is a modern take on the Three Stooges, currently in pre-production.
“We’re casting it now,” he says, sitting squarely in an armchair. “We’ve seen really well-known actors and total unknowns. We’ve seen a lot of people who are really good at playing Moe, Larry and Curly – it’s just that we haven’t picked the three yet.”
I suggest Paul Giamatti as Moe (they’d been thinking of him as Larry), with Rich Sommer (Mad Men’s Harry Crane) as Curly. It takes a while to come up with a Larry. Maybe Ryan Gosling, just to see if he’d do it?
Rather than a biopic, this is an attempt to relaunch the Stooges franchise.
“We’ve broken the script up into three shorts,” Farrelly says, “but each short sorta leads into the next, so collectively it’s a story, like a movie – true to the original Stooges style, but new material. We’re not gonna force our brand of humour into it if we can help ourselves.”
Interview Clips
Bobby Farrelly on dressing Owen Wilson down for his role:
Farrelly on the anachronistic appeal of Jason Sudeikis:
Farrelly on rewriting the Hall Pass script with brother Peter:
Farrelly on the secret of making the Three Stooges lovable:
normw@nowtoronto.com
