Dealer's Choice | Seth Rogen and James Franco find themselves commandeering a cop car (don't ask) in Pineapple Express
PINEAPPLE EXPRESS
Directed by David Gordon Green. Starring Seth Rogen, James Franco, Danny McBride. Now playing.
****
How good is Pineapple Express, the ultra-rare strain of marijuana that fuels the latest comedy from the Judd Apatow assembly line?
According to Saul Silver (James Franco), the only dealer in town who’s actually been able to get any, it’s really, really good. It’s “like God’s vagina.” It’s so good that smoking it is almost a crime, “like killing a unicorn with a bong.”
When Saul and his customer, Dale Denton (Seth Rogan), test it out by lighting up all three ends on a massive “cross joint”—the picture in your head is probably pretty accurate—their bugged-out eyes and gasping, manic fits of coughing confirm that we are indeed dealing with some potent shit.
Fair enough. But with Apatow’s usually reliable writing/acting collective batting an embarrassing zero-for-two so far in 2008 (with the dreadful Forgetting Sarah Marshall and last month’s all-time low-point Step Brothers), the far more important question is: how good is Pineapple Express?
Well, it’s not quite God’s vagina, but it is pretty wonderful.
Rogen’s Dale is a protagonist very much in the spirit of other Apatow Productions productions: he’s a slob, he has a job low on prestige but high on verbal abuse (he’s a process server, handing out subpoenas to people who’d rather not be tracked down), and he smokes a lot of weed. He has a girlfriend (Amber Heard), but she’s still in high school. When we first meet him, he’s driving around in his car, smoking constantly, listening to “Electric Avenue” on repeat, and announcing his opinions to whichever daytime talk radio show will put him on the air. This, we sense, is a man steadily approaching some kind of life crisis.
His wake-up call comes when he accidentally witnesses a murder while staking out his next target, Ted Jones (Gary Cole), who turns out to be a drug kingpin on the verge of a war with rival suppliers known only (and comically) as “the Asians.” Rogen freaks out and inelegantly flees the scene back to Saul’s, convinced that he’s about to be offed for seeing too much; Ted and his crooked police officer accomplice (Rosie Perez) see Rogen’s car speed off and they too freak out, convinced that Rogen is the Asians’ newest hired gun.
What follows could be called a fish-out-of-bongwater story, full of car chases, shotgun battles, and more than one instance where pot-fuelled paranoia comes true. Can the police “triangulate” cellphone signals with instantaneous, GPS-like precision? In this universe they can. Or how about Franco’s second-hand description of Cole (“I heard he’s crazy about murdering”), which turns out to actually be pretty realistic? The jokes are still there, and fully formed, but the stakes quickly escalate beyond the everyday problems of your typical pothead—it’s more Guantánamo Bay than White Castle, so to speak.
We’ve seen stoner comedies before, and we’ve also seen stoners become reluctant action heroes before, but one of the reasons Pineapple Express is so fresh is its consistently loving attention to detail. Rather than simply focus on jokes that stoners would laugh at, director David Gordon Green (with able assistance from Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s screenplay) faithfully recreates the way that stoners really behave—a far more complex and satisfying goal. When Franco listens to Rogen explain what his job entails, watch how blissfully unaware Franco’s reactions are: he mumbles incoherently to himself, trying and failing to follow even the simplest lines of logic, his glazed eyes betraying an underlying fear of having absolutely no idea what is going on around him. It’s funny, sure, but it’s also perfectly true to life.
At this point, though, I wonder if it’s even possible to affect the marketability of a film with Apatow’s name on it. Just like his other films, males aged 18-24 will likely make up two-thirds of Pineapple Express’ audience, and, just like the others, it will likely be accused of being unfair to its female characters and even borderline sexist. These reactions aren’t necessarily deserved—Brideshead Revisited has an equally blinkered male point of view, but you won’t see Evelyn Waugh’s name getting raked over the coals with quite so much indignation—but they do confirm that Apatow, Rogen, and company are the comedy team to beat in today’s Hollywood.
Personally, I couldn’t be happier. After all, who could hate a film that ends with the main characters eating breakfast at a diner, broken bones and bullet wounds untreated, reminiscing about the fight scene that just happened? Even a night of explosions and gunfire can’t stop the stoner’s innate desire for instant nostalgia.
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