Zach and Miri Make a Porno

Judd Apatow has made a mint over the past few years producing comedies that follow a consistent template; indifferently directed tales of delayed adolescent man-children groping their way towards maturity and love while spouting filthy one-liners along the way. If that formula seems familiar, it’s because Kevin Smith practically invented it. Yet, while his films have consistently existed as mildly profitable niche entertainments, Apatow has taken Smith’s dude-centric cult sensibility and turned it into a string of mainstream mega-hits.

This is not a great injustice. Apatow produced films like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked-Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall are light-years better than most of Kevin Smith’s work. Smith’s raunchy dialogue tends to be awkward, stiff and fake-sounding, his direction is slipshod and the emotional interaction between his characters is over determined and superficial. Apatow movies are upgrades across the board. The improv-heavy dialogue is naturalistic in a way that Kevin Smith and his penchant for baroque diatribes could never reproduce. There is a vastly greater attention paid to cinematography and shot composition. Most significantly, the characters are more vibrant and relatable. Apatow took the slacker-ethos and gleeful crudeness of Clerks and Mallrats and gave it heart and poignancy.

Credit Kevin Smith for lack of ego. Instead of raging against a comedy poacher who found a way to turn his cinematic jalopy into a hot rod, Smith has observed the myriad ways that Apatow has fine-tuned his model and incorporated those changes into his new film Zach and Miri Make a Porno. The result is Kevin Smith’s funniest, most heartfelt and technically adept film in a long time.

Smith’s smartest decision is borrowing Apatow leading man Seth Rogen and casting him in the role of Zach. Rogen’s bombastic delivery gives Smith’s dialogue an organic feel that it usually lacks. Smith also seems to have finally grasped the fact that film techniques and editing can enhance character development.

The story concerns two slackers: Zach and Miri (Elizabeth Banks, looking way too put-together to be working at a mall in Pittsburgh), attempting to get a hold on their mountain of unpaid bills by making a porn film featuring themselves and marketing it to their former high school classmates. In the process, these Platonic roommates discover depths of feeling for each other they’d never admitted to themselves before. None of the romantic twist rate as original or particularly interesting. Still, the relationship resonates thanks to vulnerable performances from the leads. Even in the absence of an innovative plot the usual Kevin Smith parade of Byzantine sexual references prove consistently funny, especially since there is a context for all the raunch.

The frustration of watching Zach and Miri comes from seeing a whole host of comedic premises go undeveloped due to Smith’s choice to focus intently on the evolving relationship of the leads. The mainstreaming of pornography and the rise of amateur porn on the internet are subjects ripe for exploration. Instead of delving into them, Smith treats the porn set-up as a flimsy pretext for unleashing weapons-grade filth and putting his protagonists on a path towards love.