Comedy films
The comedian makes his directorial debut with a bitter failure about three elderly fathers who rail against political correctness
Fri Oct 20, 2023 08.01 BST
Judd Apatow has spent much of the 21st century showing America how boys become men. His films have developed coming-of-age narratives for plus-sized youth into legal adulthood. In Knocked Up, Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd embodied the irresponsibility of twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings, respectively, and in This is 40, Rudd’s character faced the trappings of middle age; In all cases, they came to the crucial realization that they must stop holding on to vestiges of immaturity so that they can care for the people they care about. For these schlubs, wanting to stay young forever meant smoking weed during the day, playing Wu-Tang with friends, and going to rock shows without the wife’s permission. For an ensemble in their fifties, however, resisting the march of time becomes a far more difficult proposition.
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In Bill Burr’s gritty directorial debut, Old Dads, our boys Jack (Burr), Connor (Bobby Cannavale) and Mike (Bokeem Woodbine) mostly long for the past as a golden age where they could get away with anything before wokeness came and started puzzling all the alpha males. They dabble in male nostalgia in the truest sense of the word, as co-founders of a second-hand jersey retailer that they just sold to a dim-witted millennial CEO (Miles Robbins) who will soon use cancel culture to oust them after They were caught on the microphone calling the deathly names of Caitlyn Jenner. Fresh out of a job and each burdened with the responsibilities of a different phase of parenthood, they must either adapt or face the prospect of a long, cold and lonely future, stolen from a graying Apatovian warm-up to a wake-up call road trip to Las Vegas from the second act of Knocked Up. Of course they will get their act together, but they won’t be happy about it, and as they continue to rail against a tolerant present, they will eventually give in rather than accept it, and neither will we.
A skilled standup with prickly comic powers, Burr makes the script he co-wrote with Ben Tishler sound like a reactionary Jerry Seinfeld routine. Have you ever noticed that the only people who use those stupid electric scooters are losers with low testosterone? Or the fact that there’s never a parking space when you drop your kid off at the overpriced bougie elementary school? And what’s the deal with pronouns?! He passes off stale complaints as observations and describes himself as the last voice honest enough to repeat the top 40 complaints he discovered after a few minutes of scrolling on Facebook. The most biting joke comes when Burr is willing to give it to himself rather than everyone else, while a stranger delightedly agrees with Jack’s anti-vaping stance and then goes on a tirade about these good-for-nothing immigrants. Then she farts.
Being a bastard introduces a person to shady bedfellows, drives away their loved ones, and ultimately, as a cautionary rideshare driver suggests, ridicules them until they become Bruce Dern. Netflix executives refer to this archetype as “crunchy but harmless,” but Burr’s bile really puts this second installment to the test. While Cannavale and Woodbine represent two closely related species of well-meaning boobs, curmudgeonly Jack has a real bitterness about him, even if he always shied away from open hatefulness, even as he exudes anger at everything. At a critical moment, the gross righteousness of the bulwark that has taken Joe Rogan to task for spreading misinformation comes to the fore: the only reason he’s so fed up with all the sensitivity crap is because so many of his advocates are out of caution against social exclusion rather than act from genuine virtue. Maybe that’s a cynical view of respecting others, but he’s just the type of person you take or leave.
In his mission to retire from the un-PC and proud rageaholic actress or start a new family, Jack faces exactly the same dilemma as Ari Gold from Entourage, a program with a comparatively – if less consciously – outdated perspective on masculinity. It’s more apparent in Burr’s sampler of midlife crises, but the specter of death looms over both, a shared fear that foregoing time with one’s brother to be a dutiful husband brings a person that much closer to mortality brings. (Like Nora Ephron before him, Cannavale’s character feels bad in his neck.) Viewers who would expect Jack to come to terms with this by finding something to appreciate in the modern world would be sorely mistaken Growth is limited to the realization that curses have the least effect on anger when muttered quietly out of earshot rather than shouted in the face of the perpetrator. It’s not nothing, and yet it’s barely anything, barely enough to base a film on. The coming years will not be kind to Jack, as they will surround him with more and more reasons to feel confused and angry, testing his resolve not to say anything as he dreams of their slow, painful demise. And that should be doable from a comic perspective. When it’s not used to grind dull culture war axes, sputtering, impotent rage is a staple of the comedy. It just has to be funnier.
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