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Indeed, this may be Smith's passkey film, a guidebook to his beliefs and pecadillos, and it's telling that he had to take personnel from beyond his insular world to get to it. It's also telling from where he borrows his talent - star Seth Rogen and costar Craig Robinson hail from the world of white-hot producer Judd Apatow, and Apatow's signature combination of warmth and crudity has echoes in Smith's ongoing obsession with obscenity serving as a cover for a squishy center.
The aforementioned Rogen plays Zack, the male half of the titular twosome, while Miri is played by the suddenly-ubiquitous Elizabeth Banks. As this is a Kevin Smith film, you know who they are - smartass slackers with crap jobs and dirty mouths. The two live together, and their combined earnings can't stretch far enough to pay their bills, maybe because Rogen considers a Fleshlight an essential purchase. An encounter at their tenth-year high school reunion with a classmate (a sheepish Brandon Routh) who has since come out of the closet and become involved with a garish gay porn star (Justin Long) gets them thinking of homegrown porn starring themselves as a way out of their financial predicament.
No points for guessing that the threatened on-camera coitus eventually leads to emotional complications. Zack and Miri is nothing if not formulaic. Yet, the value lays in what the formula means this time around. From a simple story about two people who finally admit that they've been in love for a long time, Smith spins out a sweetly dirty ode to sex as a form of humanism.
The easily-noticeable theme through pretty much all Smith's work is his characters' inexhaustible libidos. The older he's gotten, though, and the closer his heart gets to his sleeve, it's become clear that he sees this as a genuine commonality; vulgarity and hormonal madness, for Smith, are leveling impulses designed to display us at our most human. Men, women, old, young, black, white, all of the above - no matter our differences, we all think about getting our fuck on. Whole industries have sprung up around us getting our fuck on and our interest in other people getting their fuck on. It's more than that, though - sex, in Smith's world, is at the center of our being, the reason we bother doing anything. Lust and its release thereof can be a destructive force ("You could give me a handjob in the girl's locker room"), but it can also be a benevolent, fulfilling and even empowering one, as it is for much of Zack and Miri.
So the film has a hook for thinkpieces. Doesn't mean a thing if it isn't funny, right? It is, thankfully, pretty darn funny; Smith's ceaseless dedication to the uttering of things beyond the pale has its ups and downs, but he's still got a pretty good feel for logorrheic coarseness and he's helped along by a capable cast that delivers the grimy goods with gusto playing to type. Rogen proves reliable as the blustery, smarter-than-he-looks boor that, by this point, is his stock in trade (his triumphant declamation about filming "arcing ropes of jism all over this motherfucker" is worth remembering), and he's matched at every turn by Banks, who manages to make something quite lovely out of a role that, like most female roles Smith writes, skirts the edge of unplayable fantasy. Craig Robinson once again steals scenes with his soft-spoken, vaguely annoyed delivery like he's Ricky Henderson and the film is second base; what's left is often pocketed by Jason Mewes, playing an ambisexual burnout whose talents for tumescence play an important role in the film within the film (think Jay with the hyped-up obnoxiousness bleached out and replaced by a shrug and an eternal hard-on).
Of course, none of the above is terribly surprising - all involved and mentioned are working within their comfort zones. (The lone exception is Long, unexpectedly hilarious in his extended cameo as a rasp-voiced lounge-lizard drama queen who enjoys getting epically drunk and making people uncomfortable with his bragging about his role in films like You Better Shut Your Mouth Or I'm Gonna Fuck It.) That's probably the best way to describe Zack and Miri - comfortable. Whenever Smith tries to do something he really shouldn't be doing (Tisha Marin-Campbell's unfunny racial-humor cameo, for instance), the film stumbles, but he keeps a low thrum of mangy likeability alive as long as he works within his expected parameters. He has apparently purged himself of the depressed uncertainty that marked his last film, the underrated Clerks II and is now all smiles and assurance that it'll all work out, no really, it will. If anything, Zack and Miri can be seen as a deliberate attempt to prove himself ready for a career as a Hollywood journeyman; not only is he delivering what he's best known for in a package that retroactively ties together something towards which his previous films have striven, his direction has finally risen to the level of competence. Nothing in the film is as painful as, say, the climax of Dogma, and there's even a couple of memorable shots. I keep flashing back to the overhead shot of Elizabeth Banks falling atop a pile of coffee beans, lost in a rapturous mix of emotional joy and post-coital satisfaction, and I realize it's simple, direct and almost elegant. In other words, it's as good as it needs to be. And that's all I really ask.
- Steve Carlson (0 comments)