There’s a certain futility to any critical appraisal of a film like Jim Hosking’s third feature, Ebony & Ivory. That’s not to say there’s a shortage of discursive properties to wrestle with or that it’s lacking in an authorial voice worth interrogating, but rather that such typical rhetorical avenues are subsumed within the larger singularity of Hosking’s comedic sensibilities. In other words, viewer response is a purely wavelength-based proposition here, and no measure or quality of expatiation is likely to sway opinion one way or the other.
With Ebony & Ivory, Hosking returns quite distinctly to the style of humor redolent of his debut, The Greasy Strangler, this after less successfully detouring into somewhat more digestible (and star-supported) territory with An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn. Where that sophomore film felt the strain of its attempted needle-threading between the outre and the orthodox — the result being an awkward, square peg-round hole affair where only a few of the performers felt properly dialed-in to the director’s specific flavor of eccentricity — The Greasy Strangler was a grimy, willfully abrasive provocation that reveled in its muck-slathered personality and memeable nonsense mantras. There’s a certain brashness requisite to weaponizing a chant like “hootie tootie disco cutie” as a psychological cudgel and asking your characters to swing it at each other as an act of interpersonal warfare. For better and worse — depending on the scene, depending on who you ask — Hosking wore that brashness like a badge of honor.
Another leitmotif of The Greasy Strangler’s screenplay was the constantly lobbed accusation: “Bullshit artist!” It’s one many a viewer would ascribe to Hosking in the wake of his debut, and one not likely to be disabused by Ebony & Ivory, which similarly indulges the director’s penchant for offering up repetitive gibberish and gifting his actors lines of dialogue that are utterly diabolical in their blowhard brainlessness: “You ever been on a journey so long that your thirst became biblical in its enormity?!” is one memorable response here to a simple question. The film likewise retains a writing style that, when not imparting such ironic pomposity, seems constructed by a method of edible-aided, free-flowing word association, utilizing a few foundational repetitions (both in-scene and across scenes) and fleshing out the rest with only lightly parsable gobbledygook. More than anything else, it’s in this idiosyncratic approach to dialogue that we come closest to finding Hosking’s fingerprint.
But Ebony & Ivory is more than just The Greasy Strangler being mama-birded back to us. Despite relying on a similar bag of tricks, there are certain textural differences at play this time around. Most notably, Hosking’s latest is far less horror-coded than his debut — which, quite hilariously, resembled Lee Daniels’ Precious in its aesthetic design more than anything — and instead replaces that tonal charge with a cottagecore quaintness (teapots and stash boxes are here decorated with knitted covers). It’s fitting for a narrative that utilizes a recognizable template of film drama: two old friends and musical legends, Paul (Sky Elobar) and Stevie (Gil Gex), reunite in a remote Scottish cottage — a phrase repeated ad nauseum throughout the film, each time in what can only be described as a teeth-first speaking style — to discuss a potential collaboration. Except, in one of the film’s best non-jokes, this throughline only receives a few seconds of attention, with screentime instead reserved for the duo’s constant countdown-aided threats of lunging at one another, emphatic product placement spots for fictional alcoholic beverages, and a prolonged beachside swimming-cum-rescue sequence featuring a pair swinging prosthetic schlongs.
It’s precisely this flavor of juvenilia-rooted flagrancy that makes The Greasy Strangler, Ebony & Ivory, and Hosking writ large such a divisive proposition for the layviewer, and any effort in defense of his work such a senseless endeavor. Comedy is, of course, the most subjective of genres from the perspective of audience engagement, and few categories of comedy are as wholly subjective as the territory of anti-comedy. Perhaps more purely even than his previous work, Hosking roots Ebony & Ivory firmly in the sphere of Andy Kaufman, goosing this tradition with his poet of the vulgar causticness. But to give glance only to the superficial grotesquerie and word salad-driven social intercourse is to miss the point of Hosking’s comedy. He understands the punchline to be passé — or put differently, the punchline to be its very absence — which affords him the freedom to noodle with inanity, utilizing language as a sensorial element rather than a narrative mechanism or the filmic motor. In a sense, a film like Ebony & Ivory even reaches toward the aural avant-garde, delivering enough gonzo polish through Elobar and Gex’s performances to amuse (or enrage) those who are fully engaged, but also orchestrating line deliveries, tempos, and volume in such a way that it successfully rejects the need for linguistic legibility in its comedy. In this sense, Ebony & Ivory works as the film equivalent of “red leather, yellow leather” — looped, of course — in the best possible sense. If this notion appeals, well, you probably already knew that three paragraphs ago. If it doesn’t, there’s naught to do but try to relax with a bit of the Doobie Woobie and a Wee Billy’s Big Wee Fizzy Beer. It certainly can’t hurt.
DIRECTOR: Jim Hosking; CAST: Sky Elobar, Gil Gex, Carl Solomon; DISTRIBUTOR: Drafthouse Films; IN THEATERS/STREAMING: August 8; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 27 min.
Comments are closed.