Seth Rogen, our generation’s pothead Peter Pan, is afraid to grow up again. Ever since his spot-on screenplay for Superbad (co-scripted with regular writing partner Evan Goldberg), Rogen has mined comedic gold from coming-of-age anxieties, whether high school graduation or impending parenthood — the passing of personal milestones are occasion for existential dread. And lots of drugs.
Nowhere near as focused or incisive as last year’s Neighbors, director Jonathan Levine’s The Night Before is a ramshackle romp through the Rogen formula co-starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anthony Mackie. The somewhat convoluted backstory (narrated in rhyme by Tracy Morgan) explains that ever since JGL’s parents were killed in a car wreck on Christmas Eve, these three lifelong friends have spent the holiday out on the town getting plastered together, longing to attend a secret, invitation-only bacchanal known as The Nutcracker Ball.
After a dozen or so years of this, it’s kinda time to move on. Rogen’s a successful lawyer with an extremely pregnant wife (Jillian Bell) and Mackie is an NFL star mysteriously having the season of his life at age 34. The orphaned Gordon-Levitt, however, remains adrift. Underachieving at go-nowhere jobs and blowing it with his girlfriend (Lizzy Caplan), he seems to only live for these yuletide benders with his increasingly distant bros.
Having decided that this will be their final night on the town before embracing adulthood, the boys head out for some wild and crazy adventures that are never quite as wild and crazy as Levine’s antic direction seems to think they are. Stylistically, the movie attempts to ape the screeching nocturnal momentum of Scrooged but the screenplay (credited to Levine, Goldberg, Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir) feels like a rough draft. It’s a lot of half-baked conceits that don’t really fit together, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t laugh.
Naturally, the funniest bits involve Rogen and drugs. Decked out in a glorious Star of David sweater, the straight-laced Dad-to-be devolves into a paranoid party monster, tripping on shrooms, hoovering blow until his nose bleeds and having nightmare hallucinations of his unborn daughter all grown up and working at a strip club. These are extremely familiar riffs for Rogen, but he happens to still be really good at them. My personal favorite running gag involves him accidentally switching phones with an office pal (Mindy Kaling) and receiving an array of gargantuan dick pics from a suitor of hers named James. I’m terribly embarrassed to admit I didn’t see the glaringly obvious punch-line coming a mile away, but the roundabout route it takes getting there is still delightful.
Less involving are Mackie’s strange steroid subplot and Gordon-Levitt’s attempts to woo back Caplan, both of which seem to take place in different, more grounded universes than the rest of the picture. The Night Before‘s scattershot but at times very real charms are perhaps best exemplified up by a brilliant performance by Michael Shannon as Mr. Green, the boys’ high school pot dealer.
Hovering on the sidelines of scenes, halfway between deadpan and dramatic, Shannon’s work is so wonderfully strange that during his brief appearances he flips the entire movie over onto his own unique time signature. (The towering, terrifying figure seems so jarringly out of place in a picture like this that none of the other actors seem sure of how to respond to him either.) At first just a weirdo, Mr. Green gains pathos and ultimately becomes something of a tragic hero, in ways that in all honestly don’t really make any sense. But by then The Night Before is just flinging stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Mr. Green sticks.
3 thoughts on ““The Night Before” Feels Like A Rough Draft”
This is another racist movie where fat ugly Seth Rogen plays an explicitly Jewish character, while good-looking Jewish actors (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lizzy Caplan, this time) play non-Jews. As a matter of fact, despite being the son of two Jewish parents, Gordon-Levitt has never explicitly played his own ethnicity once in his entire 30 years of acting. Is there a problem, Joey?
This is the same racist trick Rogen pulls every time. He always casts himself as an explicit Jewish character opposite non-Jewish characters played by good-looking Jews (Paul Rudd, James Franco, Dave Franco, Zac Efron, Halston Sage, etc.).
And this new film is from the same studio, S.S.ony, that released last year’s Fury, about fighting Nazis during WWII. Fury starred no less than four Jews (Logan Lerman, Jon Bernthal, Jason Isaacs, and Shia LaBeouf), yet none of the characters were Jewish and Jews and the Holocaust were never mentioned. Gee, maybe they should have cast Seth Rogen as a “funny” Jewish soldier who died early on in the film.
Actors of fully Jewish background: Logan Lerman, Natalie Portman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mila Kunis, Bar Refaeli, James Wolk, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Julian Morris, Adam Brody, Esti Ginzburg, Kat Dennings, Gabriel Macht, Erin Heatherton, Odeya Rush, Anton Yelchin, Paul Rudd, Scott Mechlowicz, Lisa Kudrow, Lizzy Caplan, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Gal Gadot, Debra Messing, Robert Kazinsky, Melanie Laurent, Shiri Appleby, Justin Bartha, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Margarita Levieva, Elizabeth Berkley, Halston Sage, Seth Gabel, Corey Stoll, Mia Kirshner, Alden Ehrenreich, Eric Balfour, Jason Isaacs, Jon Bernthal, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy.
Andrew Garfield and Aaron Taylor-Johnson are Jewish, too (though I don’t know if both of their parents are).
Actors with Jewish mothers and non-Jewish fathers: Jake Gyllenhaal, Dave Franco, James Franco, Scarlett Johansson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Daniel Radcliffe, Alison Brie, Eva Green, Joaquin Phoenix, River Phoenix, Emmy Rossum, Rashida Jones, Jennifer Connelly, Sofia Black D’Elia, Nora Arnezeder, Goldie Hawn, Ginnifer Goodwin, Amanda Peet, Eric Dane, Jeremy Jordan, Joel Kinnaman, Ben Barnes, Patricia Arquette, Kyra Sedgwick, Dave Annable, Ryan Potter.
Actors with Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers, who themselves were either raised as Jews and/or identify as Jews: Ezra Miller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Alexa Davalos, Nat Wolff, Nicola Peltz, James Maslow, Josh Bowman, Winona Ryder, Michael Douglas, Ben Foster, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nikki Reed, Zac Efron, Jonathan Keltz, Paul Newman.
Oh, and Ansel Elgort’s father is Jewish, though I don’t know how Ansel was raised. Robert Downey, Jr. and Sean Penn were also born to Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers. Armie Hammer and Chris Pine are part Jewish.
Actors with one Jewish-born parent and one parent who converted to Judaism: Dianna Agron, Sara Paxton (whose father converted, not her mother), Alicia Silverstone, Jamie-Lynn Sigler.
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