Tuesday, 27 August 2019

Late Night (2019) - Movie Review



I’ve gotten into a fair few of my personal hobbies over the course of these reviews. Beyond the obvious, that is. Comic books, anime, music, hip-hop first and foremost, and just about anything I can pull from as a reference point over my 24 years of pop culture intake. But more than any of those, even the ones that I’ve dedicated a solid junk of my own life to immerse myself in, my first love will always be comedy.

Cracking jokes with friends, putting random shit out on Twitter to see if it gets a reaction, looking for any excuse to twist the topic of conversation into a punchline: I live for that shit. I’ve spent more time thinking about my own philosophy regarding comedy and what makes people laugh than any sane human being should, although you’d be forgiven for not picking up on that just from what I write on here, as rambling and didactic as it frequently turns out. My point is that the art of comedy is very important to me, and I take great pride in any laughter I get over the course of my day-to-day routine, and when films like this come out, I can’t help but jump out of my seat and basically yell at the screen “Thank you! Someone else out there gets it!”

Calling this film simply funny feels like I’m doing it a certain disservice. It is indeed very funny and very consistent with its jokes, but it’s the subject matter at play that wins it some serious points. Whether it’s industry minutia like the process of writing for a late-night topical show or examining the sexual and racial disparities when it comes to what is ‘funny’, Mindy Kaling’s writing is some of the sharpest I’ve seen in years. It feels like she’s tapped into every single thing that she’s encountered over the course of writing for shows like the American version of The Office and The Mindy Project, and turned it into sheer comedy gold.

It is insanely refreshing to hear stuff like this, spoken both by Kaling and Emma Thompson with a truly fucking amazing performance here as a late-night show host, because for quite a few years now, I’ve been hearing arguments that this very kind of comedy is what has been killing the industry. This (supposedly) new brand of ‘woke’ comedians who spend as much time talking about the reality of their lives as they do making jokes. One look at the reactions to the works of Aussie stand-up Hannah Gadsby and her recent rocketing into popularity brings up a lot of the same points: That comedians are functioning more like journalists than actual stand-up acts, that they’re actively making their own audience feel guilty for laughing, that their material only exists to win social justice points rather than actually being funny.

It’s a bit insular, and kind of annoying to see get reiterated, and it’s that very mindset that ends up in the crosshairs of Kaling’s more pointed criticisms. Without coming across as outwardly incendiary, as this definitely comes from a place of respect and admiration, Kaling (and by extension Thompson) take shots what is essentially the face of modern stand-up in the form of Ike Barinholtz’s Danny Tennant. The brashness, the prioritising of offending people without any real intent beyond the act, using the subjective nature of comedy as a shield to basically say anything and get away with it; it’s lazy and more than a little insulting to try and paint this as the only form of comedy that’s worth a damn.

It spits in the face of people like George Carlin, who used people’s hesitance with curse words to highlight how much emphasis we put into our own language, or Mel Brooks, who used satire and slapstick to mock real-world racism and fascism, or even Thompson’s Katherine Newbury, who finds renewed life in Kaling’s Molly and her insistence that trying to make others laugh should come from something real. A means of breaking the tension of the real world, instead of a blanket to keep one’s self from ever having to face it.

This is a similar line of thought that was brought up in Kumail Nanjiani’s The Big Sick, another brilliant comedy that pokes at the straight-white-male standard of the industry. However, for two big reasons, I honestly think this does even better with that approach. For one, the scope of the comedy goes beyond just racial tensions and steps into pretty much anything socio-political, allowing for more variety.

And for another, the drama is just that much harder to turn away from. Among this film’s many, many selling points, Thompson and John Lithgow as her husband are among the highest, giving insanely good performances of very grounded and mature relationship drama, making for some of their best respective work ever. And even if the story structure is a bit iffy in how it handles the switching between Molly and Katherine’s perspectives (growing pains for a first-time feature effort, I’m guessing), the pathos in both smooths over just about all of the cracks in the foundation.

As a comedic drama with elements of romance, and as a treatise on comedy as we near the end of the 2010’s, this is fucking brilliant. It crystallises so much truth about the art of comedy, its use and the genuine good it can do when we aren’t just using it as pretence to be gobshites, that I have no doubt that it will get written off by some as virtue signalling liberalism that only further highlights the death of comedy. And for those who want to stop people over-politicising everything by… over-politicising everything, more power to them. But for those like me who see comedy as more than just a vehicle for cruelty, it makes for some very refreshing and poignant viewing.

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