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Mike Miller… family man first, NBA champion second.
Someone needs to knock up Jenny Aniston. A womb that has yet to bear fruit by forty is hip and trendy, but once you start truckin’ along toward the big 5-0, it’s gut-check time. It doesn’t matter how much of an empowered feminist you are, there is no stronger urge than preventing eternal deoxyribonucleic annihilation, which becomes a certainty once your final egg commits bloody suicide and none of its predecessors have been given the chance to walk the Earth. Consider We’re the Millers, where a semi-A-lister happily portrays a forty-something stripper in the last days of her fading allure, as Aniston’s final mating call to America.
Don’t get me wrong; I love the older ladies. They just assume most of the horribly racist things I say are Archie Bunker references, while the younger women I date insist that I apologize to the busboy. I’d like to say I prefer the older ladies of the pole as well, but I had one rather embarrassing experience with a “seasoned” stripper, such that I can’t help but prefer the teenage runaway type these days. Back in ’05, my boys and I were out on the town in Tampa for my bachelor party. I was blacked out by the third tequila shot, but apparently we made our way to central Florida’s hottest gentlemen’s club, The Body of Christy. I somehow ended up in the seltzer room with the 45-ish elder stateswoman of the club, whose services were priced such that four twenties and three singles were more than enough to purchase the full range of “extras”, sans protection.
I thought on the whole it was a pretty baller night out, until the rehearsal dinner the following evening, when I met my mother-in-law-to-be for what was supposed to be the first time. Long story short, I now have a son who will have an inordinate amount of difficulty trying to draw his family tree for Ms. Capshaw’s third grade art class.
Though cinematic excellence may not have been Aniston’s primary motivation for partaking in We’re the Millers, this movie is about as perfect a fit as one could imagine given her skillset. Her role of past-sell-by-date stripper required a laissez-faire middle-aged actress super-secure with her personal image; Aniston knows she’s one of America’s all-time sweethearts and has got nothing left to prove, so she has no problem sort of poking fun at herself here. Showing off that rockin’ bod to potential suitors around the world is a bonus as far as she’s concerned. Like her three co-leads, she puts on a well-done though not especially memorable performance. The implication here would be that the film as a whole is not memorable, but this is not the case. We’re the Millers is quite memorable, and the fact that it pulls it off without spectacular contributions from the bulk of its cast is a testament to its A-grade execution.
America is a road-faring nation, thus we need a good road trip movie every annum or so. We’re the Millers will be more than sufficient to tide us through 2013. It’s Vacation on steroids, steeped in irreverence and cynicism, appropriately mirroring an American Dream that has been fading ever since Chevy Chase stopped being funny.
The general formula for any road trip flick involves skimping on the plot in favor of random humorous set pieces in which the protagonists participate whilst on their journey. We’re the Millers takes that concept to the extreme, and probably has about as sparse a plot as it could get away with. The premise is this: Jason Sudeikis is a middle-aged burnout drug dealer who has his sizeable stash nicked by street thugs. In order to make up the loss to his supplier, he’s forced to mule a sizeable pot stash from Mexico back across the border to the nation where people can type and don’t sleep all day. In order to feign that he’s an upstanding family man and avoid the scrutiny of la policía, he picks up three ne’er-do-wells from in and around his apartment complex to play the part of his wife and offspring: the aforementioned Aniston, a young lanky white guy, and an attractive homeless girl, who has no problem acting out sexually yet somehow doesn’t realize that she can strip like Aniston to avert said homelessness. They set off to Mexico in an RV, and pick up the pot no questions asked. From a narrative perspective, the movie pretty much ends right there, about 30 minutes in. It’s nothing but assorted, loosely conglomerated funny stuff the rest of the way.
This could have ended up being a cinematic disaster, as the four leads put in workmanlike performances, but they are not nearly funny enough to carry this plot-less comedy. As in any road trip film, it’s the “bit players” surrounding the lead cast that usually make or break the experience, and the people that the faux-Millers meet along their journey are usually quite spectacular, with nary a dull moment. One of the first characters we meet is Aniston’s strip club manager. Once he appears on screen, it’s very apparent that the folks behind We’re the Millers understand what’s funny, so you’ll buy in for the next hour and a half. Though he only has about six lines spread out over four minutes of runtime, the club manager is a “minor” comedic character for the ages, doing a smooth-talking, sleazy yet good-natured version of Bill Lumbergh.
Once the Millers hit the road, they meet and cavort with a second family, the Fitzgeralds, who happily aid the Millers when they encounter mechanical difficulties. They’re the born-again Christian type, happy as clams just to be alive on God’s green Earth, and provide a perfect foil to the Millers, who are pretty much just waiting to die. The Fitzgeralds haven’t been wrecked and reamed by life like the Millers, so they still hold on to an innocent optimism that the Millers have long since discarded in favor of fatalist pessimism. When the two team up, there’s still plenty of raunchy comedy to be had, but it’s raunchy comedy with a big dose of surprisingly genuine heart.
A movie like We’re the Millers is all about how many scenes are hits and how many are misses. If you pull off a solid average, then you’ve got a solid movie, and this flick comfortably passes through that threshold with room to spare. In fact, there’s really only one substandard portion in the movie, in the final act after the Miller boy has his testicle bitten by a spider (spoiler alert). At this stage, the Fitzgeralds are swapped out for an illiterate carnie portrayed by an actor who seemed dumber than his character. It appears as though the producers considered removing this entire sequence. There’s a scene where Sudeikis walks into a hospital to speak with the doctor about the venom-stricken boy, and is told that it’s gonna be a while. Then, while Sudeikis and Aniston hang out back in the RV, the girl hooks up with the carnie. This saga goes on for about fifteen minutes, and then there’s a nearly identical scene of Sudeikis walking into the hospital again to be told the boy is A-OK. They could have immediately cut to the second hospital scene fifteen minutes earlier and we would have been none the wiser. This segment, followed by a quite clumsy and abrupt ending, leaves somewhat of a sour taste in your mouth, but the overall experience is still strong.
This is Aniston’s best film in some time, and as such, I feel she may finally be in my league. So Jen, let me tell you a little bit about myself, then perhaps we can set up a date at a local food court? I’m 36, thrice divorced, twice amicably. I clean out my DVR bi-weekly, and have recently cancelled my subscription to Vivid Video’s DVD mailing list (I wasn’t aware you could find comparable content online for the same or even lower monthly fees). And most impressively, I am America’s premier film critic, currently sporting double-digit quarterly readership if you round up liberally. I’ll text you my contact info once my phone rolls over to next month’s billing cycle.
