film: the hangover

A cross between a Quentin Tarantino film circa 4 Rooms and a Judd Apatow bromance comedy with the stoner jokes excised, the Hangover wasn't actually as bad as I thought a comedy about a bachelor party gone awry in Las Vegas could have been. No where near as funny as Forgetting Sarah Marshall (that could have something to do with my affection for Jason Segel and the abusrd brillance of the Dracula puppet musical), but it had a certain charm. I liked the fact that although the movie was about a bachelor party (and as the closing credits explicitly shows, strippers and sex were involved), the film itself nearly eschews all mention of marriage being a killer of masculinity. There's one bit of dialogue with Bradely Cooper's character discussing how marriage will kill the groom slowly, but it's played for laughs not for seriousness. (Plus, I have a hard time buying Cooper as a complete reprobate; the first two seasons of Alias pretty much have cemented him as a good guy in my head.) The film never reinforces this motif; in fact, his character seems like a happily married man and father at the end. Ed Helm's character shouldn't marry his obnoxious, controlling girlfriend, but the film doesn't make this a point about marriage in general, just about the girlfirend. I both liked and disliked the fact that Doug (Justin Bartha) ended up stuck on the roof for a day and a half. Smartly (and here the Tarantino comparison comes in) nothing that was shown in the scene of the hotel room, except for the chicken, goes unexplained. This narrative tightness and closure gives the film momentum. The fact that the film spend most of its time tracing the night of debauchery versus actually showing it helps here. There is a lightness to the film that it would lose; the closing credit coda actually reinforces that. The story of the aftermath is much better than the story of how they got there.