The Two Best American Comedies of 2006

Amid such drek as is provided annually by the Wayan brothers or even mediocre fare like the broad frat pack comedy staple that we’ve come to expect from America, it is indeed rare to find films that are funny without being stupid and clever without being sappy. It’s the British who are known for their wry observational wit or subtle, languid examinations of comic detail in life. After all, The Office, without the usual laugh track and pretension towards any real story has become a benchmark for the nihilistic, post-millennial humour that Generation Y is characterised by and which older audiences find more congruent to their transitional entropy as they age. One might argue, of course, that Kubrick’s satire of cold war paranoia, Dr. Strangelove or the droll dementia of the brothers Coen are luminous examples of Uncle Sam’s respect for intelligent laughs but you know what…it’s been a good three years since the Coens made anything and Stanley is, well you know, dead.

But this past year, two films that really stood out for being smart and hilarious at the same time were Little Man and X-Men: The Last Stand…not. That was just to see if you were paying attention.

Jason Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking and Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton’s Little Miss Sunshine are in fact the two films that I refer to and if you haven’t been fortunate enough to catch them in a theatre near you, go hold your video rental guy/girl at gunpoint because you’ve missed something, you have.

I doubt you need me to tell you what a blithe, winsome film Sunshine is…the multiple Oscar nominations and Alan Arkin’s dark horse victory speak for themselves. But here’s the reason that despite countless and frankly by-now-hackneyed variations on the dysfunctional family syndrome in quirky independent films, Little Miss Sunshine stands out: it’s not about a dysfunctional family. It’s about dysfunctional people who work only as a family. The family unit is the cohesion and order that props them up and supports them to be the losers that they are with pride and joy. Because guess what, the only people who really give a damn about whether you’re falling or flying are the people to whom you’re bound by blood.

It says something about the film that Abigail Breslin’s seven year old would-be beauty queen, Olive, confides nervously to her grandpa that she wants to win the pageant because “Daddy doesn’t like losers”. Of course, Daddy (played by the reliable Greg Kinnear) isn’t exactly setting the bar very high, being a self-help guru whose ‘9 Steps to Success’ aren’t working for him at all. At one point, the audience is shocked when he tells his daughter to not eat ice cream unless she wants to become fat – what kind of horrible father does that? One could say that he did it to reveal the realities of life to her. I’ll go a step further: He did it to reveal the realities of his life to her. Having failed at something as quotidian as helping people, there’s not much hope for inner peace for him, at least for a while. So he channels the outer requirements of success, the superficial accessories like being thin and rich and pretty onto Olive, who’s about to enter that hallmark of shallowly anchored achievement – the beauty contest, beauty being the operative word. Natch.

Then there’s Steve Carell in the body of suicidal, uber-scholar and heartbroken homosexual, Olive’s Uncle Frank, ‘America’s No.1 Marcel Proust expert’…deadpan, doleful and just…darn good. He brings his bored, pop-Byronic act from The Office to the ensemble with great effect and it his arc from spurned statistic (on being told by his sister Sheryl that she’s glad he’s alive he says “That makes one of us”) to the protective uncle who springs up with great brio to defend his niece’s performance in the talent show, threatening murder, that really enlivens the film so much. The aforementioned sister, Sheryl, is of course the always charming, Toni Collette who plays put-upon mother, sister, wife and daughter-in-law and manages to not make her just another hassled female trying to keep it all together. Which is what her role essentially is.

Stand outs are of course Paul Dano, with his Nietzsche-phile, wannabe pilot, Dwayne, who refuses to speak until he makes the cut at flight school. Or until he finds out he’s disqualified from ever being one, whichever comes first. (His succinct reaction after nine months of utter silence? “FUUUUUUUUUCK!”); Alan Arkin’s potty-mouthed, super-horny, disillusioned Grandpa who coaches Olive for her the talent show (and to everyone who’s seen the movie – we all know how that turned out) is a revelation in his brash, brazen but still lovable vim. When Olive asks him if he thinks she’s pretty he answers that he totally thinks so and it’s not because she has brains and a personality. Yep. That Oscar was well-deserved. But the real surprise package here is little Abby Breslin who’s cute without being cloying because she doesn’t act cute. She should have won the Oscar for that last sequence alone and as the titular character, she really is the sunny, bright and slightly eccentric heart of the film.

For a film with almost no plot and contingent entirely on the characters and their depictions, Little Miss Sunshine is an odd, moving odyssey with knowing winks and laugh out loud moments – there is the irony of Olive’s co-participants, all 7-8 year old girls, being dolled up perversely to look like 30 year olds but performing chaste, safe little dance routines and songs whereas clueless, lovely Olive herself being the most outrageous of all – and in its poignant, non-preachy, comic realism it grasps lucidly the dynamics of the ties that bind all of us. We, as a species, can all be quite intolerable and inscrutable in our fetishes and quirks, but there are those who will tolerate and scrutinise us…our family. One line of dialogue alone sums up this humorous, highly entertaining slice of the cogs and wheels of how we loathe and love our families at the same time – “Everybody, pretend to be normal.” If only.

Personally, I felt that Thank You for Smoking was, despite all Sunshine’s splashy funniness, much cooler. Perhaps I’m partial to satire but this film had me in stitches. Christopher Buckley’s eponymous novel became an instant bestseller on its release in 1994 and has been adapted with excellent cinematic consciousness by Jason Reitman, who at 27 (when he made this) is preternaturally adept at this sort of thing…it’s a very precarious coign, brainy parody, and one teeters on the tip, knowing that it’ll either fall flat as being too intellectual and therefore lose the humour in the hubris or its appeal will be distributed so widely in the ‘8 to 80 target group’ that instead of telling the joke, it’ll be one. With this film, Reitman not so much hits the nail on the head but hammers it right in with a precision and debonair effortlessness (like he was whistling and talking on the phone while doing it) that is the trademark of its protagonist, Nick Naylor, tobacco lobbyist, father to a 12 year old boy and, according to audiences that comprise the weepy talk show circuit, the direct descendant of Satan. Of course, he’s doing it to…you know, pay the mortgage (the yuppie Nuremberg defence apparently).

As the wily, sexy and surprisingly self-aware spin doctor for the fictional Academy of Tobacco Studies, Aaron Eckhart is the movie. Here’s a guy who’ll tell you that nicotine intake and emphysema aren’t related and, wait for it…you’ll buy it. As professional bullshitter and suave shill, Nick Naylor cannot be beaten. Not even by the puritanical Senator with the unpronounceable name (William .H. Macy) who’s wrath he has incurred by making a career out of defending America’s right to smoke, come hell (which is where he’s been condemned by more than one person), high water, death threats, attempts on his life and er…lying journalists who sleep with him for a scoop (a surprising turn by Katie ‘Mrs. Tom Cruise’ Holmes). In one scene, at his son’s school, a little girl claims that her mother says smoking kills. His response is to infer that since her mother is neither a doctor nor a scientist, she doesn’t sound like much of an authority. Touché. When he’s not shooting down attacks by militant politicians, Nick shoots the breeze with his friends, alcohol spokeswoman Polly Bailey (the woefully underrated Maria Bello) and Bobby Jay Bliss (David Koechner), public relations expert for the gun industry. They are the M.O.D (Merchants Of Death) squad, presumably because it makes them sound that much rad. There’s a hilarious argument they have regarding what kills people more – fags, booze or bam bam – wherein they try to trump each other by quoting figures, like an auction…I kill 5 people; I kill 10; that’s it? I kill 20…and here’s the thing, despite all this, we never hate Nick. In spite of his being pretender to the throne of Hitler with the amount of people his product of choice manages to off, we can’t bring ourselves to abhor Nick. Not really, no.

Redemption comes in the form of his son, the creepily sophisticated kid who’s trying really, really hard to understand why the hell his father chose to make a living convincing people that cigarettes are alright. As with most screen interpretations of father/son rapport, the denouement relies heavily upon the child’s ability to save his father from his own shortcomings. To accept him and lead him towards the resolution of his incumbent problems. Here too, world-weary prepubescent, Joey (who accuses his mother of using him as a pawn in her subconscious revenge on her failed marriage to Nick and points out to Nick that he might have dependency issues – within an hour and a half of screen time) assumes responsibility for helping his overgrown child of a father to find himself and face up to his failures and duties. And manages.

The great thing about Thank You for Smoking is that it combines caricature of conservative hypocrisy surrounding any kind of vice, with a robust line-up of alternately pathetic and charming people. The argument is that everyone knows smoking is wrong and yet, well, the figures speak for themselves. Poking fun at the habit and the politico-corporate brouhaha surrounding it while remaining aloof from the trap of picking a side and ruining the fun (there’s not one cigarette smoked in the film), the movie stylishly swerves into many territories – wit, burlesque, dramedy and outright ha-ha funny – and just like Nick, wins us over with its cunning and charisma. This, then, packs a punch with biting but below-the-radar criticism; black comedy and heartfelt hilarity. Oh and Mr. Eckhart…thank YOU for being so smokin’.