Superbad (2007) – The Goods: Film Reviews

Least accurate film title

Gun to your head, what is the funniest film of your lifetime? Airplane! came out before I was born; I’ll fudge and say The Naked Gun, which debuted before I turned one, really belongs to the generation before me. That’s really what the thought exercise boils down to: What do you consider the great achievement in comedy from your generation? What made you and your peers belly laugh and rewatch trailers and endlessly quote punchlines? I lucked out; a slew of solid-to-great comedies came out between 2004 and 2010, when I was aged 16-22. Or, maybe, I was aged 16-22. What better age to laugh your ass off at raunch and idiocy?

For me, no comedy from my teen years and young adulthood has stood the test of time better than Superbad. It is a film that always has jokes I’ve forgotten about, and even the ones I remember still make me laugh. It is filthy, but if you scrape away the caked bodily fluids of the heavy-R screenplay, you find a touching tribute to young friendship, and the importance of letting those bonds weather the storm of humiliating teenage life while you still can. The cast is astoundingly great, the pace relentless, the turns of phrase unforgettable, and the characters well-drawn. The dialogue often sounds like witty teenagers might actually say it; and that’s in part because Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg started writing it when they were thirteen.

Superbad revived the teen buddy comedy and locked in a refined template for the format. All of the story structures and character types it deployed had existed before, but work in a wonderful, synchronous harmony here. In fact, “It’s Superbad, but…” has become a reliable story structure to my eyes. That pitch alone will almost always get me in the door. (I just recently used it describing what I hoped Y2K would be, e.g.) The components that make up this paradigm are, 1) a pair or group of teenage doofuses are stuck on the outside of the popular social order; 2) they go on a one-crazy-night odyssey to a party or big event; 3) with the ostensible goal of getting laid or finding love (but, really, to better understand their own souls and their friends before they depart into adulthood); 4) wherein everything goes wrong in a series of shenanigans, before 5) a reunion between the doofuses at the end of the film in which they are slightly wiser and perhaps romantically fulfilled. But, 6) they ultimately realize that what they really needed was the friendship and lives they had in the first place. The real lost virginity was the friends we made along the way. Superbad perfects every one of these story points.

The doofuses in question are Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera). They are third-wheeled by a king doof-among-doofs named Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), but whom you surely know as McLovin. Mintz-Plasse has had a long and productive career as a comedy character actor, and yet whenever he appears, I point like Rick Dalton and say “hey, it’s McLovin.” It will always be this way. Some actors so perfectly inhabit their iconic characters that it’s a blessing and a curse.

I’ve long been of the opinion that Cera as a young adult was the funniest actor of his era. The main pillar of this argument is Arrested Development — in which a 15-year-old Cera keeps up with and, many times, surpasses the work of a beloved troupe of grown-up comedians — but Superbad is bullet point 1B in my thesis. Here, he plays Evan as a twist on the stereotypical 1980s film virgin; horny, but not in a depraved way, like you can tell his parents taught him how to have a healthy sexual identity. Evan is the toughest character to nail because he needs to be funny, sympathetic, and pathetic in pretty equal measures, and Cera is great at every angle. There’s a bit here where he gets stuck in a room with some partiers doing cocaine who mistake him for a singer (”you’re Jimmy’s brother!”), and Evan must sing his way out. The moment is charged with danger and one of the funniest scenes of any movie I’ve ever seen because Cera’s nervous energy and his physical comedy while singing The Guess Who’s “These Eyes” is so perfect.

Hill presents a slightly more complicated case. The producers, including Rogen, Goldberg, and Judd Apatow, only reluctantly cast the older Hill. I said a moment ago that Cera had more asked of him than anyone else in the cast, but I’m not sure that’s actually true; Hill’s Seth is an unkind creation, his friendship with Evan spiked with sexual anxiety that comes out as overconfidence and pushiness. Hill treads a perfect line of keeping his edge but leaving him just charming enough that you can imagine him having friends. He is not as funny as Cera, though he’s not too far behind, but Hill hints at the dramatic chops he’d develop over the next decade. He offers in Seth a portrait you might even call nuanced underneath all the dirty punchlines.

The thrust of the story is that Seth and Evan’s crushes have entrusted them to buy alcohol for the big party that night. Seth has his eyes on Jules, played by Emma Stone in her first ever screen appearance. I will never forget the first time I watched Superbad and lost my breath at the way Stone’s eyes glimmer when Seth confesses to having feelings for her. She also gets the best delivery of the line “what the fuck” in cinema history. I knew I was following this actress wherever she was going for the rest of eternity. Evan, meanwhile is yearning for Becca (Martha MacIsaac). MacIsaac is the closest thing to a weak link in the cast, her forgettability a stark contrast to Stone. But, thematically, this also works; our high school crushes are not necessarily special, despite our intense feelings at the time. Sometimes they’re just the person who sits next to us in math. (My high school crush was special, though. At least I hope so. I married her.)

Superbad has a structure that you might call a flaw, though I wouldn’t. McLovin splits up with Seth and Evan early in their evening saga after an attempt at underage alcohol purchase is interrupted by a robbery. (Whether this is intentionally a reference to American Graffiti or just a happy coincidence, I’m not sure.) McLovin spends the rest of the night stuck with two bumbling cops, Officer Michaels (Seth Rogen) and Officer Slater (Bill Hader). Michaels and Slater offer a grown-up contrast to Evan and Seth, two buds with a homoerotic friendship that have accepted it rather than letting it drive tension and angst between them. Rogen and Hader are so sublimely funny in this, offering dialogue that sometimes borders into the shaggy, a harmlessly playful spirit serving as contrast to the terror of their irresponsible policework. But the problem is that we essentially have two movies that have no real reason to interact. You could cut the McLovin-cops thread from the movie and it wouldn’t really harm the arc or comic effectiveness of Seth and Evan’s party quest. This doesn’t really make it expendable, since it’s so funny, but it does mean we’re bouncing between different threads. It would probably be a pacing and momentum problem if the movie wasn’t so uniformly hilarious. McLovin’s thread at least highlights some of the film’s narrative ironies: The uber-dweeb McLovin lives out the film’s biggest fantasy, Seth’s object of lust wants to take things slow, and Evan’s long-simmering crush drunkenly throws herself at him.

Part of what I admire about Superbad is analogous to what I love about Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Besides being a comedy, it really works hard to explore the characters and the way the plot events change them. You wouldn’t in a million years call the material dramatic, but the narrative serves the development of Seth and Evan in a way worse comedies don’t bother with. Specifically, the evening helps the pair realize they haven’t processed the fact that they are sad about saying goodbye to each other when they head to college in a couple months, and both feel slightly betrayed and scared. They’ve had years of easygoing best friendship where they can be the most pathetic version of themselves around each other. After the party, they drunkenly admit that they love each other, and at the mall the next day when they reunite with their crushes-maybe-soon-to-be-girlfriends — the very goal they stated aloud at the beginning of the film — they’d rather just spend some of their precious little remaining time hanging together.

There’s a particular bit of character development in Seth that is accented by Hill’s performance. We gather without the movie putting a label or too fine a point on the matter that Seth has some unrealized quirks in his sexuality: He is completely obsessed with dicks — like even more than the average 18-year-old horndog. He proffers multiple broad-sided critiques of femininity, and there’s an air of frustration to his lack of sexual fulfillment that reads as if he is missing some actualization in his soul. Maybe he’s queer, or maybe he has some unfulfilled kinks. Or maybe he’s 18 and has raging hormones. It’s clear even Seth doesn’t quite realize whatever is going on, though Hill really plays up the looks of longing towards Cera in the film’s closing minutes.

As much as Superbad is very much a script-and-actors comedy, the density and delivery of jokes the key appeal, it is also remarkably well directed. Between this and Adventureland, Greg Mottola makes a case as one of the shrewdest and most effective comedy directors of his era. His recent Confess, Fletch was smartly made, too. I’ve been saving his cult comedy debut from 1996, The Daytrippers, for a special day, as it has all the makings of a movie I’ll love. In Superbad, I especially love the flowing energy and chaos of the first party that Seth and Evan crash; it’s grungy and not exactly appealing but it has a tense energy. Mottola shoots the entire film as if it could take place anywhere from the ‘70s to the ‘00s (though a couple of references to the Internet clearly date it as contemporary to its release). William Kerr’s zippy editing never lets the momentum flag for even a couple of minutes. (As with most comedies, I recommend the theatrical edit over the unrated DVD release, though the theatrical cut is increasingly hard to find.)

Yet what the success of Superbad comes down to is just how funny it is. And, my God, it’s funny. You never go longer than 30 seconds without a big laugh; whether the source is a well-executed punchline, or some great line reading, or an off-handed turn of phrase varies from moment to moment, and yet it’s all brilliant. There’s an honesty in the dialogue cadence that you wouldn’t call naturalism, but is not heightened: The script absolutely nails the mean-mostly-as-a-cipher-for-affection texture of teen boy dialogue that rings very true to my adolescent experience. The way characters twist pronunciations into crass jokes and slide pop culture references into their banter is definitely authentic teen boy behavior.

It’s not a flawless film, and the joke hit rate is more like 98% than 100%. There’s an extended gag about elementary school Seth drawing penises that is hysterical as a comic micro-film but doesn’t quite click with the rest of Superbad as both the only flashback and a bit more heightened and absurdist than most of the other jokes here. And the tone sometimes goes too far in on the nastiness. While the film mostly offers an observational, non-endorsing lens on Seth and Evan’s shortsightedness, it does seem to share its eye-rolling repulsion of periods. (Gasp, unavoidable natural body processes!) It’s one of the few times the movie really feels like it was made by high school senior boys rather than about them.

I also accept that a film that is so crass and occasionally mean-spirited, even if most of that is only on the surface layer, will turn off significant percentages of its audience members. Its screenplay is a royal tapestry of dick jokes, but mostly dick jokes nonetheless. Not everyone wants to re-experience the undeveloped brains they had at eighteen or thinks that it’s inherently funny when teenage doofuses don’t really understand sex despite their bodies craving it more than any demographic on the planet. Not everyone is me.

As far as I’m concerned, Superbad is one of the greats: a great raunchy comedy, a great encapsulation of puerile teenage boyhood, a great rowdy ensemble cast, a great cinematic execution of a joke-delivery-vehicle. It’s a great movie, period, and one of my favorite comedies of all time.

Alright, I’ve refrained from letting this review turning into a quote-a-thon, but I’ll indulge with this last paragraph: “Prepare to get fucked by the long dick of the law!” — “Okay, so we have an African Jew wearing a hoodie…” — “Hey Greg, why don’t you go piss your pants?” — “He is the sweetest guy. Have you ever looked into his eyes? It was like the first time I heard The Beatles.” — “My brother came all the way from Scottsdale, Arizona to be here tonight and you’re not going to sing for him?” — “Muhammed is the most commonly used name on Earth. Read a fucking book for once.” — “Nobody has gotten a hand job in cargo shorts since ‘Nam!” Long live Superbad.