Baby, You Can Drive My Cart | Jack Black and Michael Cera get the comedy rolling in Year One.
YEAR ONE
Directed by Harold Ramis. Starring Jack Black, Michael Cera, David Cross, Oliver Platt, Vinnie Jones. Now playing.
***1/2
When I worked at my university’s student newspaper, some of us who made comics used to joke about the simplest, most surefire formula for college humour: take a grand historical figure, and have them act like a fratboy. Plato calling his symposium a sausage fest? Done! Cleopatra LOLing? Perfect! It’s a comedy of anachronism, but, while funny, it gets old — fast.
This, in short, is one of the two reasons I think Year One inspired such apathy from people I talked to leading up to its release. The other is the quirky-but-increasingly-obnoxious Jack Black, who, on the poster, is making the quintessential Jack Black expression: intense stare, one eyebrow up, on the verge of doing a funny dance. Even with Harold Ramis (Caddyshack, Groundhog Day) at the directorial helm — he also co-wrote the screenplay — and a really excellent cast of supporting players, including David Cross, Hank Azaria, Bill Hader, and Paul Rudd, not to mention the reliably superb Michael Cera as Black’s straight man, the film looked ready to explode in the hangar.
So maybe give it another look, because Year One is, really, a breezy and completely enjoyable historical patchwork, catapulting two expelled cavemen (Black and Cera) all around the brave new world they stumble upon once they leave their forest. Judging from the summer’s A-list comedies so far, you could do much, much worse.
There isn’t so much a plot as a string of loosely connected Biblical sketches, but part of the fun is seeing how whole-heartedly Ramis embraces the ridiculousness; there’s a kind of gleeful mischief in scenes where Black and Cera come across a bickering Cain and Abel (Cross and Rudd), or first hear mention of the sin-drenched Sodom and Gomorrah, and the film abruptly switches course to make way for new comedic possibilities. Technically Black and Cera are trying to rescue two women from their village who were sold into slavery, but that premise is basically forgotten anytime Cera gets a chance to politely ask questions like “Which one of the towns has more whores?”
To be clear, not all of the jokes connect — not by far — but this is a movie so eager to please that as soon as one gag falls flat, there are two new ones coming down the pipe to take its place. And sometimes, the simplest jokes are the most successful: there’s a solid scene where Black and Cera marvel at seeing a wheel for the first time — they eagerly hitch a ride on a donkey cart, as excited as kids on a rollercoaster even though they’re moving at barely a trot. Then they both vomit with motion sickness.
Yes, Ramis certainly isn’t above a bodily fluids joke, so we also get to see both Black licking and biting a warm piece of bearshit and Cera, dangling upside down in prison, peeing all over his own face. These are harder to justify.
And you probably could’ve guessed it, but there’s hardly a woman with a speaking role to be found. Every single joke is delivered by a man, to a man. Does the rampant sexism of the period justify it this time? Well ... the closest anyone comes to addressing it is when Black describes how smart he feels after eating an apple from the Tree of Knowledge. After explaining how it made him wonder about God, his love interest (June Diane Raphael) frowns and says, “What makes you assume God is a He?”
Black chuckles awkwardly at the ridiculousness of the question. “Uh ...” he says, giving Cera the get-a-load-of-this-broad look, “I don’t ... know what to say to that.”
Neither does Raphael — because she doesn’t get another line.
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