Observe and Report

With just three projects, cult Sundance comedy The Foot Fist Way, HBO series Eastbound and Down, and the new studio film Observe and Report, director Jody Hill has carved out a niche as the poet laureate of American masculine crisis.  His protagonists, like Foot Fist's Fred Simmons and Observe's Ronnie Barnhardt (played by Seth Rogen), are aggressive, unpleasant borderline sociopaths, agonized by the cavernous distance between their self image as powerful men-of-action and the cold, sad reality of their own insignificance.  They're men who've wholeheartedly embraced the classic American definition of masculinity and find themselves waiting for society to notice their virility.  Hill seems to have made it his mission to bring Susan Faludi's book about late capitalist American male angst, Stiffed, to the big screen in a variety of guises.

Ronnie Barnhardt is the head of security at a suburban mall who finds a reason to live when a flasher beings terrorizing female customers.  He takes the opportunity to lead an investigation that quickly devolves into bullying and racial profiling and to woo a drunken cosmetics counter girl played by Anna Faris. He's also bi-polar and, motivated by his newfound purpose, goes off of his medication.  Along the way, we watch Ronnie whiplash from public humiliation to ass-kicking triumph, never sure events are real and which are the fever dreams of a isolated, wounded psyche.  This approach allows Hill to have it both ways: he gets the audience to cheer shocking acts of violence and anti-social behavior, but the full awfulness of the acts is blunted by the dream-logic at work.  It creates a moviegoing experience that is unsettling for a whole variety of reasons as the viewer tries to figure out the filmmaker's attitude towards Ronnie's actions, the other character's attitude towards Ronnie's action, and the viewer' own attitude towards Ronnie's action.  The most unsettling aspect of all is what a viewer finds themselves laughing at. The comedy beats are essentially the same sort of humor fodder you see in most mainstream comedy; surprising acts of violence, profanity, bodily fluids, etc, but the context is endlessly disturbing.  You find yourself laughing along with the demented power fantasies of a bloody-minded, authoritarian misfit.  

Observe and Report works best as a blackly comedic take on the corrosive power of the popular American conception of manhood.  This isn't the only reading of the film, and Hill seems to go out of his way to confound interpretation, which adds to the sense of unease one has while watching it,  but it's the one most consonant with the rest of Hill's work, and the one that makes it easiest to leave the theater without feeling dirty.  The real weak link of Observe and Report is actually Rogen, who just can't emanate the sense of menace that wafts off of Hill's usual leading man, Danny McBride.  When Rogen starts yelling at people or flailing around with a nightstick, it seems like he's on the verge of breaking into a good-natured chuckle and saying "just kidding."  It's sort of like if Albert Brooks had played Travis Bickle.