Pundits are forever penning awed hosannas to the New Golden Age of TV, raving about The Wire or The Sopranos or Mad Men. (The latest is Peter Aspden in the Financial Times two weeks ago: “At the beginning of the 21st century, there is nothing sharper in the cultural firmament than American television writing.”) As an old-school film buff I always feel a twinge of resentment when I read such stories. Yes, TV is all very well, but it’s too literal. It’s always about what it seems to be about. Films, being self-contained artworks which set out to tell an entire story in two hours, work in more exalted and suggestive ways, using visual cues and subtexts and grace-notes. Film is poetry to TV’s prose, I tell myself – but then I watch something like The Change-Up, and I wonder if I can go on defending my favourite art-form. Even worse, I realise I can never again defend it using words like ‘grace’ and ‘poetry’.
The good news? The Change-Up will show you something you’ve never seen before. The bad news? That something is a stream of projectile faeces hitting our hero (Jason Bateman) in the face then, for a punchline, going in his mouth too. This happens in the first five minutes, the only (slight) redeeming factor being that the poo comes from his baby’s bottom – the kid’s anus given a loving close-up as it dilates just prior to letting fly. Bateman is Dave, a married-with-children workaholic whose best friend is Mitch (Ryan Reynolds), an irresponsible bachelor and aspiring actor. They wish for each other’s life simultaneously while peeing in a magic fountain, and wake up to find they’ve got their wish. Mitch is in Dave’s body, forced to pick up ‘his’ daughter from her ballet class and oversee a vital deal with Japanese clients; Dave is in Mitch’s, starring in “lorno” (light porno) films and fielding calls from hot women named Tatiana.
Clearly, one side is getting short-changed in this deal. The point of body-swap movies – especially parent-child swaps, like Vice Versa and Freaky Friday – is that both parties find it hard to adjust to their new life (the implicit moral being that the grass isn’t always greener), but Dave has no real problems in Mitch’s body. All the film can muster is the foolish cop-out of Tatiana being heavily pregnant (it was either that or make her a transsexual) and some ludicrous hi-jinks on the “lorno” shoot; otherwise Dave relaxes, in a cheesy Dave-relaxing montage where he visits the aquarium, watches Animal House and reads Jonathan Franzen.
The Change-Up was never going to treat its two sides equally – was never going to say, for instance, that a life of smoking weed makes you feel stupid. It’s aimed squarely at the late-teenage college crowd (here’s Mr. Aspden again: “The movies … are increasingly the province of adolescents”), especially their hidden fear of what comes next. I’m not sure when the marriage-as-nightmare comedies began in Hollywood – it might’ve been Knocked Up (also with Leslie Mann as the wife), or maybe The Heartbreak Kid – but that’s the point here, married life (and growing up in general) portrayed as a hell which you somehow negotiate. There’s no sex, no free time, nothing but constraints and obligations. The film’s tone is determinedly macho, written by the team behind The Hangover: in Dave’s life, you’re not allowed to swear and violence is totally verboten (his daughter, who’s being bullied, is urged to “strive for verbal resolution”), at least till Mitch shakes things up a little. Worst of all, women’s bodies become the enemy. Mitch-as-Dave wakes up to find his wife breast-feeding, twin babies suckling on her engorged tits (gross, apparently), then later, when he thinks she’s being amorous, she instead goes to the bathroom and takes a massive dump with the door open.
Lessons are learned, of course. Dave’s wife confesses to Dave (in Mitch’s body) that “I just want him to grab me and kiss me like he used to”. Mitch learns not to be “a quitter”, and makes up with his estranged father. But there’s an off-putting air of shrill disgust about the movie. Everything’s ugly and deliberately gross. Dave’s life is repressive and emasculating, Mitch’s life is coarse and tasteless. The script is lazy, character behaviour implausible. Mitch-as-Dave should obviously have called in sick at the office, not attended (and sabotaged) the big meeting with the Japanese clients. Dave-as-Mitch should obviously have learned his lines for the porno shoot (which would also have revealed that it’s a porno), instead of wandering around like a headless chicken.
Big-studio comedies used to care about this stuff, or at least included an excuse – however flimsy – to explain why its characters didn’t do the obvious thing, but they don’t seem to care anymore. After all, it’s ‘only a movie’, meaning multiplex fodder for groups of hormonal teens; character detail is for Don Draper and Tony Soprano. Media conglomerates (who own both movies and TV) are carrying out a secret segregation – big screen for popcorn fiends, small screen for awed pundits. I’m on the wrong side of the fence, and I hate it.
DIRECTED BY David Dobkin
STARRING Jason Bateman, Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde
US 2011 112 mins.
