Wet Hot American Summer earned a well-deserved place in the enduring cultural zeitgeist, both because of its audacious, devil-may-care flavor of humor and because it managed to bring together so many of Hollywood’s funniest performers in their pre-superstar infancy. Paul Rudd, Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks… the list goes on — it’s the ultimate “hey, I know them!” film. While he wasn’t then and certainly never became the biggest name from the cast, and hasn’t had the Marvel-ous career other stars did, Ken Marino introduced himself as an actor willing to commit 100 percent to the bit. His later projects reflect that strength as a comedic performer: as Ronald Wayne Donald in Party Down, Guy Young in Eastbound & Down, or in all his inspired appearances on Drunk History. Even in smaller parts, Marino often manages to upstage top-billed talent when it comes to delivering memorable work, and with Amy Landecker’s feature film debut, For Worse, he proves that skill remains intact. With only around four minutes of screentime, Marino’s Rick, a magician — who pays his rent with his magic skills, mind you — attempts to flirt with main character Lauren (Landecker). Some of his lame one-liners even land, and Lauren does eventually let Rick come in for a kiss. But when he slaps her and then calls her a wittle baby for getting upset, the moment is over. Lauren spends the rest of the wedding she’s attending trying to hide from Rick.
Now, at this point you might be thinking, “I have no idea what this movie is about, why are we talking about a minor character with four minutes of screentime?” That’s a fair question, with a fair answer — unfortunately, Rick’s brief moments are essentially the only entertaining ones on offer in For Worse. The rest of the film focuses on Lauren’s experience as a newly-divorced 50-something attending a wedding with the Zoomers in her acting class. Lauren joined the class in order to put herself back out there, and when she quickly hooks up with one of the younger guys in the class, Sean (Nico Hiraga), she finds herself thrown into new situations she’s never before experienced. Fair enough, but the details of said experiences are too boring to bother laying out here. Suffice it to say, we eventually arrive at the film’s climax, which involves Lauren making a fool of herself in front of all the hot 20-somethings, then riding off into the sunset with Dave (Bradley Whitford, Landecker’s real-life husband).
Discounting a film as “boring” is among the lazier criticisms to reach for, but sometimes shoes just fit. In the case of For Worse, the problem is that Landecker has written a script that is so hyper-focused on reaching a specific group of people — specifically, those who can acutely connect with a lightweight coming-of-middle-age yarn — that it feels nearly impossible to connect with it on any level if you don’t slot tidily into that cohort. Of course, such seemingly demographic-locked conceits can be easily overcome with mix or execution of humor and authenticity and meaningful insight, but all we’re given to chew on here are characters who are written as uninspired caricatures of what your basic middle-ager thinks “the youths” are like “these days,” while the brand of comedy peddled — excepting Marino’s patented absurdism — feels designed to induce a visible cringe in the viewer with every joke. And that aforementioned climax? It arrives roughly 30 minutes before the film’s end, which leaves the final third of For Worse to feel like suffering through a Midwestern goodbye.
This is all doubly disappointing thanks to the film’s marketing, which attempts to portray Lauren’s ordeal as an off-the-deep-end entry into mid-life crisis territory, but in reality she just makes a (somewhat significant, to be fair) social faux pas and then laughs it off. Given that this is Landecker’s feature debut as both a writer and director, For Worse is clearly something of a personal project, but the film simply doesn’t attempt much more than to doggy paddle in the middlebrow waters of its own creation. Still, points are always given for honesty: the film’s marketing may have been misleading, but at least its title is honest with the viewer.
DIRECTOR: Amy Landecker; CAST: Amy Landecker, Bradley Whitford, Nico Hiraga, Gaby Hoffmann; DISTRIBUTOR: Brainstorm Media; IN THEATERS: February 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 30 min.
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