I’ve made it no secret that I am a serious fanboy of Point Grey Pictures, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s production studio. I await every new release from them with bated breath, and every time I expect the bottom to fall out from their enviable track record over the 2010s… well, between The Interview and Game Over, Man!, it hasn’t been spotless but it has kept me entertained for a very long time by now. Their latest is something of a torch-passing moment for solo debut director Brandon Trost, who worked as DOP on some of PG’s bigger successes like The Night Before and The Disaster Artist. And honestly, even removing my own biases from the equation, this is one hell of an opening sprint.
Aside from a much-appreciated turn from Sarah Snook in the film’s prologue, this film is carried by and large by Seth Rogen as both the time-displaced Jewish immigrant Herschel and his great-grandson Ben. As much as I love heaping praise on the man’s work as a producer, as an actor, I can’t exactly say he’s wowed me on quite the same level yet… until I saw him in this, that is.
Along with the pretty stellar double exposure work for them both to be on-screen at once (it’s as close to seamless as it gets for this effect), he imbues both characters with their individual presence and dramatic fingerprint, and in the case of Herschel, he creates a very captivating central role that, for as bumpy as his trip into the present gets, is never not enjoyable to watch. With how easily he could have turned into caricature, that is rather impressive.
And on that note of cultural stereotypes, the main story here is a familiar one as far as culture-shock quasi-time-travel yarns go, with Herschel and Ben serving as a literal meeting point between past and present. It carries a certain similarity to Uncut Gems as examination of Jewish identity and culture, but where that film stuck to anxiety-inducing tension, the mood here is a lot lighter and sombre than that. Knowing how much his Jewish heritage has played into his on-screen persona, seeing Seth Rogen as both sides of a struggle to do with culture and legacy is quite gratifying to watch unfold, aided by how nicely the attempts at even-handedness go when taking in both perspectives.
It is in that even-handedness, and indeed the main culture shock of Herschel experiencing modern-day Brooklyn, that the film hits some of its smartest points outside of the main cultural examination. Over the course of Herschel’s mission to make it big in America, Simon Rich’s script makes some pretty damn accurate statements on the current state of mass media and how people engage with it.
It ties into the main conflict in how it shows the way we examine older viewpoints and traditions through modern perspectives (and judge them by that metric), but it also says some pretty righteous things about social media and cancel culture. In just a few scenes, it questions the efficacy of PC outrage, and calls out the incredibly pompous way that free speech pundits talk about provocateurs (or, as we call them over here, shit-stirrers), serving as a more refined approach to the eerily progressive moments in Rogen’s last starring role with Long Shot. Where things get weirder is that, because of how much it says in such a small amount of time, it almost feels incidental, like Rich and Rogen just happened to drop truth bombs while examining an adjacent topic.
What makes all this even more remarkable is that, in the process of depicting all of these complex ideas and occasionally heartbreaking developments between Herschel and Ben, the film always stays at this perpetually pleasant and warming mood. Trost’s direction combined with John Guleserian’s vibrant cinematography and Nami Melumad’s gently beautiful soundtrack work (with additional work by Michael muthafuckin’ Giacchino!) creates this strangely calming effect that keeps everything on the rails, whether it’s brushing over the science of how Herschel survived being pickled or symbolically reclaiming his legacy from the Russians that threatened it in his own time. That kind of tonal balancing act, especially for a film that deals in topics this volatile, is exceptionally rare, and it’s the core of one of the best features Trost, Rogen, and even Point Grey at large, have ever been involved in.
No comments:
Post a Comment