Here I am talking about another good R-rated comedy immediately after wondering where the comedies for grownups have gone. Egg on my face.
Pineapple Express centers on a bad person (Dale, Seth Rogen) whose self-righteousness, obsession with weed, and adolescent mindset prevent him from seeing just how bad he is. He’s a thirty-year-old dating a high school student, for fork’s sake. The one good person in his life is his weed dealer (Saul, James Franco), but he refuses to see that this clearly good dude would thus be a good influence on him. Instead, Dale just pops in for the minimum amount of socializing needed to replenish his stash, then he bolts.
The rest of the movie is Dale slowly realizing that Saul is and should be his best friend (there’s a bunch of crime thriller stuff padded around this, but it is emotionally and narratively inessential). The arc follows traditional romance comedy tropes, to the extent that “bromance” became the buzzword for this type of story after the movie’s success. Pineapple Express was ahead of the trend by leaps and bounds, as the emotional breakthrough scene includes the two characters in sexually suggestive positions with each other, but that isn’t the joke so much as it is the filmmakers acknowledging that small tweaks to buddy movies shift the story from friendship to more than friendship. The buddy cop genre had already intentionally and unintentionally tread in these waters for decades before Pineapple Express, using the contrived “meet-cute” of the romantic comedy and its opposites attract ethos to have two dudes shout at each other until they reach an understanding right before going after the bad guy in the third act. Some buddy cop movies were more successful than others at coopting romantic narrative tropes for action movies: 48 Hours is often cited as an originator of the buddy cop conceit, but I think it’s a crummy movie that works solely because of Eddie Murphy; Lethal Weapon is great; Midnight Run is ok, and mainly due to its deep cast. There are a million ways that movies can fail, but a lack of chemistry is pretty damning. Rogen and Franco have great chemistry in Pineapple Express.
I had moved to Columbus, OH a few years before 2008, and it was highs and lows (mostly lows). I was turning things around by 2008, though, finishing my degree and working at a bakery. Outside of work and school, it is a hazy time for me because I was insanely busy and tended to overindulge and self-medicate during my free time. Columbus, if you’ve not been, is great: it’s a huge, flat Midwestern city, so, excluding the zillion miles of suburbs hacked out of cornfields, it is reasonable to get around without a car. The public transportation is pretty good, as are the bike trails, and Ohio State sitting at the center of the city also keeps a steady stream of new shops and restaurants in its proximity. I’ve heard that rent and real estate prices have escalated in the decade-plus since I lived there, which is a huge bummer but true of basically everywhere. I lived on an idyllic street just north of campus. The street ended at an entrance to a public park, and the couple of parallel streets were all hemmed in by the rail trail (that wound way north and all the way through the heart of the city) and the rest of the park and the river. It was a nice spot, especially for getting to and from the campus and downtown.
I saw Pineapple Express in the theater near campus just off Olentangy River Road. I don’t remember who else attended, but I do remember not loving the movie. I found it to be too shouty and the action felt very contrived: it never seemed like the characters were in actual danger (excluding the very gross ear injury), and on top of that, the villains were all played by veteran comedy actors (Rosie Perez, Gary Cole, Craig Robinson, Kevin Corrigan). I’ve grown to enjoy the comedy style, especially the 13 years of creative brilliance from Danny McBride/Jody Hill/David Gordon Green since Pineapple, on projects ranging from the masterful The Righteous Gemstones (2019) to the very enjoyable Halloween reboot (2018) to the hit-or-miss Eastbound and Down (2009–2013). And for what it’s worth, McBride and Hill are not the screenwriters on Pineapple; Hill wasn’t even involved, per IMDB. And I think that I’ve grown to enjoy Rogen’s comedy a little more in the intervening years too, especially in The Interview (2014).
But most of all, I was struck by James Franco’s performance* as Saul in my last rewatch of Pineapple Express. I think that he’s the heart of the story and everything works because of his energy. The clever twist in the screenplay is that we immediately like his character, and thus assume that Dale must like him… only to see that Dale doesn’t. Dale sees him essentially as a store clerk. The screenwriters thus subvert the morphology of the rom-com by having the falling-out in the first act instead of at the end of the second act. The will-they-won’t-they for the rest of the movie is all pointed at Dale: we the audience are just waiting for him to have a moment of clarity.
Other 2008 candidates: Frost/Nixon; Che; Quantum of Solace; The Dark Knight; Synecdoche, NY; Tropic Thunder; Step Brothers; Transsiberian; Burn After Reading; Blindness
*Taking a very wide step around his personal life and focusing just on the performance in the film.
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.