Director Craig Johnson has worked with alums of Saturday Night Live before: His 2014 film The Skeleton Twins featured nuanced leading performances from Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader soon after their tenures on the show ended, marking the beginning of varied, fruitful acting careers for both in the decade since. His new film, The Parenting, a streaming release for Max, marks another collaboration with a notable SNL figure: current co-head writer Kent Sublette wrote the screenplay. Yet, The Parenting is not a departure from Sublette’s comedic work in the same way that The Skeleton Twins was for Wiig and Hader. Rather, in its high-concept joke of a setup — a meet-the-parents romcom gets interrupted by a demonic possession — the film plays like a typical five-minute sketch extended to feature length. But even if not every joke lands, and the plotting required to justify a full-length film alternates between clichéd and nonsensical, Johnson, Sublette, and a game cast stacked with decorated character actors milk the silly conceit for all its worth to deliver an entertaining farce.
In The Parenting, young couple Josh (Brandon Flynn) and Rohan (Nik Dodani) have rented out a charming country house for them and their parents to spend the weekend in. They’ve planned this short trip to introduce themselves to each other’s parents, and their parents to one another, but Rohan has also been secretly planning to propose to Josh. The situation predictably goes awry: Rohan is tense and nervous, Josh doesn’t impress Rohan’s judgmental mother, the two sets of parents have little in common, and an unexpected visit from Josh and Rohan’s friend Sara (Vivian Bang) throws another wrench into the already awkward weekend. Unfortunately for all of them, the house also happens to be haunted by a demon, and Rohan’s father Frank (Brian Cox) becomes its human host after reciting the Wi-Fi password — a suspicious Latin phrase — one too many times. As Frank inexplicably levitates, vomits, and hurls torrents of verbal abuse, the motley crew bands together to fight off the demon.
The film’s casual centering of a loving queer relationship is a welcome touch, and Flynn and Dodani give broad yet charming performances as the central couple. Their expressive performance styles are effectively counterbalanced by the seasoned actors playing their parents: Edie Falco and Brian Cox are Rohan’s parents, Sharon and Frank, while Lisa Kudrow and Dean Norris are Josh’s parents, Liddy and Cliff. These actors find laughs by cannily underplaying their parts (though Cox hams it up as necessary when embodying the demon), and Johnson and editor Josh Crockett highlight these actors’ skills and idiosyncrasies through well-timed cutting of dialogue and reaction shots. Kudrow’s performance is a highlight — one of her particular skills as a comic actor is awkward and uncomfortable social interactions (her leading role in the series The Comeback was a two-season showcase of just that), and Johnson locates plenty of opportunities for Kudrow to, for example, repeatedly correct the pronunciation of her name, remind the household that she brought a dish of “crazy noodles” that nobody’s eaten, and apologize for swearing at an evil demon possessing her future son-in-law’s father.
The details of why this particular house is possessed by a demon, and how to exorcise it, are overexplained, involving numerous flashbacks, a dusty book of spells found in the basement, and an origin-story monologue given by the house’s kooky, mysterious owner (a reliably funny and ideally cast Parker Posey). These genre clichés are forgivable, mostly because they aren’t treated with much seriousness, but they do occasionally drag down a film that requires a steady stream of jokes and comic set pieces to maintain its forward momentum. The comic bits themselves are also uneven — the humor suffers when Sublette and Johnson overindulge in first-thought jokes involving vomit and flatulence, for instance. Yet on the whole, while the broad comedic style of The Parenting won’t work for all audiences, others will likely find its proud goofiness refreshing in a time when feature-length comedies are consistently undervalued.
DIRECTOR: Craig Johnson; CAST: Edie Falco, Lisa Kudrow, Brandon Flynn, Nik Dodani; DISTRIBUTOR: Max; STREAMING: March 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 40 min.
Comments are closed.