Film Friday: Paul (2011)

I’m a fan of Simon Pegg’s work. Shawn of the Dead was incredibly witty, clever and funny. It was a brilliant homage to zombie films. Hot Fuzz wasn’t quite up to Shawn’s standards, but was still well done and had great moments. Paul is flat. It also suffers from a giant liberal sucker punch.

** spoiler alert **

Paul is the story of two nerds from Britain, Graeme (Simon Pegg) and Clive (Nick Frost), who run into a real alien, Paul (Seth Rogen), while touring the American southwest. Paul has been on earth for decades and has run away from the government. Pegg and Frost decide to give him a lift. Soon they pick up Ruth Buggs (Kristen Wiig), a Christian fundamentalist. The rest of the movie is a slow motion chase as they take Paul to a rendezvous point to be picked up by his own people.

Why Paul Doesn’t Work: The Sucker Punch

Let’s start with the sucker punch. Most of what people call sucker punches aren’t. For example, interpreting two groups of penguins helping each other as a message promoting collectivism and the United Nations is downright paranoid. And others are too weak to matter, like making an oil company a generic villain. But genuine sucker punches do bother me, and this film has one. Here’s why.

Paul was marketed as a comedic homage to science fiction, and no mention was made that this film would attack Christian fundamentalists, but it does, and it’s mean-spirited about it. Right after Pegg and Frost pick up Paul, they run across Kristen Wiig. Wiig plays an ignorant, closed-minded Christian fundamentalist who fights with the nerds over the issue of Creationism. Shortly thereafter, Paul implants his knowledge of the universe into her mind. Suddenly, she realizes there is no God and that she’s been wasting her life trying to be moral. For the rest of the film, she drinks alcohol, smokes dope, swears every other word, and become hypersexual. She also expresses disdain for other fundamentalists, whom she now views as stupid.

These are direct attacks on the beliefs of fundamentalists and on their intelligence. There is nothing good-natured about these attacks. Indeed, substitute “American Indian” for fundamentalist and then ask yourself if it would be considered good-natured for an American Indian character to suddenly realize that their beliefs are stupid, to adopt the exact opposite behaviors associated with Indian culture, and then to denigrate other American Indians for being stupid. Odds are, that wouldn’t go over too well, would it?

Further, Wiig’s father is presented as the typical Hollywood trope for fundamentalist Christians. He is a hateful man, who dominates and terrifies his daughter. When confronted with anything of which he disapproves, he literally reaches for his shotgun and his Bible. He is, of course, murderous.

None of this was good-natured. To the contrary, it is denigrating and insulting. None of this was necessary for the plot either. But more importantly, none of this was anything audiences would have expected from the topic of this film or the marketing of this film. That’s what makes this a genuine sucker punch. And so you know it was intentional, both Pegg and Frost are atheists who told the BBC they wanted the film to explore atheism.

Why Paul Doesn’t Work: The Humor

Sucker punch aside, this film is just flat. In many ways, Paul seems like the kind of film Judd Apatow would make if he were smarter. Indeed, despite the really broad topic Pegg and Frost have chosen with Paul, it is in essence an Apatow film with almost all the jokes being about swearing, being gay, or having sex. Further, the jokes are generic and are carried on FAR too long.

Swearing: About 90% of the jokes in Paul involve swearing. And I don’t mean that swearing is used to convey the joke. Instead, the fact that someone is swearing IS the joke. For example, it’s supposed to be funny that Paul swears. And the first couple times it is. But it soon becomes part of his character and just isn’t funny anymore. Yet, they keep treating each swear like a punchline.

Kristen Wiig swears too. In fact, she swears constantly. Here the joke is that being freed from her religious stupidity, she is now free to swear, which she does with reckless abandon. But, and this is supposed to be the funny part, she’s not good at it, so her swearing is awkward. This may have worked in theory, but it was very poorly executed. Wiig doesn’t come up with clever or creative lines, nor does she do anything interesting like speak hidden truths or say the inverse of what the rest of us would say. She just randomly tosses out words, e.g. “ok, penis milk.” It’s just not funny. Moreover, they never stop this joke. She swears in every sentence for the last 70 minutes of the film and it becomes tedious.

Compare this with Debra in Dexter. She has a lot of problems including inappropriate swearing. But the way Dexter handles it is hilarious because of the timing, the word choice and the reactions of those around her. Her outbursts are sporadic and so far over the top of what is appropriate that you literally can’t stop yourself from laughing. Wiig’s swearing, by comparison, is constant and without purpose. She might as well be adding a random word in every sentence.

Sex Jokes: Besides the constant swearing, Paul is largely a collection of sex jokes. Indeed, this isn’t the kind of film where you learn about an alien culture or get a new view of human nature. Instead, you get a series of jokes about anal probes and alien genitalia. You also get awkward jokes about sex with nerds, and you get a steady stream of gay jokes. Some of it’s funny, but it hardly lives up to the promise of an homage to science fiction.

Weak Referential Jokes: Finally, where this film does rise above Apatow’s work is in its homage to science fiction. Indeed, Paul is strewn with references to science fiction like a cowboy bar band playing the Star Wars cantina music, the use of lines like “boring conversation anyway” after a telephone gets shot, Blythe Danner punching Sigourney Weaver and saying “let him go, you bitch!”, and Paul sitting in the Raiders of the Lost Arc warehouse. In this regard, this film is very much like Shawn of the Dead where the references are well set up and used appropriately and creatively. The film also trusts its audience enough that it doesn’t try to point these references out.

That said, however, this film is way too shallow in this regard. Indeed, whereas Shawn of the Dead was tightly written, this film wanders and abandons the homage for large stretches as they revert to the sex and fart jokes. For example, the opening is great, as they begin at Comic-Con and they briefly lampoon many of the excesses and oddities of nerd culture. But this lasts only two minutes. Then they switch to gay jokes. Then there’s another brief montage of alien-conspiracy culture as they drive an RV through the southwest, which ends in gay jokes. At this point, you’re about five minutes into the film and beyond this point, the science fiction jokes become scarce until the ending. There certainly are references to specific science fiction movie moments throughout, but they aren’t the focal point anymore. Instead, the film becomes a chase film with occasional references to science fiction mixed in between the swearing jokes, the sex jokes, and the atheistic proselytizing.

That’s why this movie didn’t work for me. Whereas Shawn of the Dead was an incredibly smart movie which distills zombie films to their essence, Paul is a stupid Apatow-like comedy disguised as something smarter and with an obnoxious sucker punch running throughout.