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And why should she? For one thing, lowbrow pays the bills - nobody went to see any of the Scary Movie films just to see her, yet there she was, and every ticket put a buck in her pocket. More importantly, though, lowbrow's what she does, and she's damn good at it. Just because her previous attempt at a breakthrough lead role (Smiley Face) was directed by indie stalwart Gregg Araki, played the Toronto Film Festival and was given a quiet NY/LA arthouse release doesn't make it anything other than a discursive slapstick pot comedy that would be damn near unbearable if not for Faris's freaked-out knockabout mania. It's practically a mantra at this point: Hi, this is Anna Faris. She rescues bad movies.
So it goes for The House Bunny, a formulaic late-summer comedy that, by all rights, should be a lot more terrible than it is. Its premise - a Playboy model banished from the mansion becomes house mother to a misfit sorority about to lose its charter - sounds like the kind of high-concept nonsense where the writers were satisfied with the mere idea, leaving the audience waiting for laughs that never show. The writers, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, have a cottage industry centered on churning out minor variations on one idea and are apparently proud of the fact that they helped write the stillborn Amanda Bynes vehicle She's the Man. Wolf's last film was Strange Wilderness.
Yet, that's the magic of Anna: Imbued with the potential to be no more than a tired and tacky variation on the ugly-duckling story that Hollywood seems to love so much, The House Bunny instead achieves a measure of ebullient amusement thanks to the devil-may-care comedienne in the lead. As written, erstwhile Playmate Shelley Darlingson could easily have sunk into a swamp of dumb-blonde stereotypes, but Faris turns her into an unflappable, psychotically bubbly whirligig. She rolls handily with the pratfalls, malaprops and general obliviousness that go with being Shelley, yet she never condescends to the character or signifies that she's above all this. If anything, Faris makes the belated revelation of potential untapped smarts within Shelley believable, if only because she makes Shelley look like the kind of girl who really can do anything if she believes hard enough and sets her mind to it. (The line, "My heart would fall out of my head," and the subsequent explanation of said line does in this regard seem to be the film's key moment.) Her good spirits can't help but infect the proceedings, making them more entertaining than expected.
It's a good thing that Faris is so appealing, too, because the rest of the film is disposable at best. I give Lutz & Smith a little credit for attempting, however awkwardly, to subvert the hot-girl-with-glasses template by framing it outright as a fairy tale; credit is also due for their leveling of the playing field by having Shelley learn as much from her initially-geeky charges as she does from them, which at least tamps down the anti-thought slant of many of these narratives. But this is barely coherent as a narrative, with false crises popping up at regular intervals to elongate the plot and character motivations switching on a dime. (Funny how pierced-n-spiky Mona's caustic feminism falls away the minute she gets a makeover.) The film also becomes much tougher to bear when it tries to take itself seriously; I'd like to think that Shelley's big monologue at the end was actually intended as a parody of such monologues, considering it makes zero sense, but I fear it was meant in earnest. And while Emma Stone has a few good moments (her giddy description of a BYOM - Bring Your Own Mouse - party is a thing to treasure), most of the cast is functional at best. The generally reliable Christopher McDonald pops up in a couple of scenes as the college dean, and it's a testament of the filmmakers's apathy that even he looks like he'd rather be somewhere else.
Yet, I can't say I didn't laugh. I can't say I wasn't amused. I can't say that I was angry or annoyed upon leaving the film, even when the credits pushed me out the door on the wings of some godawful robo-pop version of "I Know What Boys Like." Overall, The House Bunny isn't much of a film, no more than agreeable fluff. But I put it to you: Is there really something so dishonorable in elevating slop to the level of enjoyable tolerability? I say no, and I hope you would agree with me. Welcome once again to The Anna Faris Show, and enjoy your stay.
- Steve Carlson (0 comments)