I’ve found myself in the uncomfortable position of defending a movie littered with F-grade vulgarity, brutal “comic” violence and a climactic chase scene built around full frontal male nudity.
Many of you probably already know I’m referring to “Observe and Report,” a crass comedy about a deluded shopping mall security guard (Seth Rogen) on a deranged power trip. The picture is intended for giggling 14-year-olds, yet it has sparked the sort of spirited debate normally reserved for political pundits on cable news shows.
Many people have decried the film as yet another example of Hollywood using shock comedy to sell tickets. Others, myself included, have defended it as a darkly comic and empathetic portrait of a disturbed mind. Is a movie in which Seth Rogen gets into a racist swearing match with a mall vendor (Aziz Ansari) worth all this fuss?
I think so, for “Observe and Report” is far different than your average raunchy comedy in that it raises pertinent questions about audience empathy – and Christian empathy in particular. Yet the negative response to the movie also has me wondering: Can Christian empathy go too far?
Let me first be clear that “Observe and Report” undoubtedly empathizes with Ronnie, its main character. Sure, many of the gags revolve around Ronnie’s risible job or his bipolar symptoms. Yet even as the movie seems to be setting Ronnie up for a laugh, it is subtly drawing us into his world, whether it’s with the tender conversations he shares with his alcoholic mother (Celia Weston) or the montage that traces the healing of his bruises after a particularly violent encounter of his own making.
This oddly sympathetic approach is a trademark of writer-director Jody Hill. Hill’s previous film, “The Foot Fist Way,” chronicled the dismal luck of an incompetent, strip-mall tae kwon do instructor (Danny McBride). The ultimate effect of Hill’s approach is that we come to experience these stories from their unhinged characters’ points of view – and that, after all, is how empathy begins.
Empathy, it seems to me, is a distinctly Christian trait. What is Jesus’ Incarnation if not the ultimate empathetic act? It was the truest way for Him to understand us. More than anything else, “Observe and Report” understands Ronnie, despite his delusions, his coarseness, his violence. He’s unclean, to be sure, but isn’t that the sort of person Jesus spent his ministry engaging? In its own crude and comic way, “Observe and Report” allows us to understand Ronnie too – and those in the real world who are like him.
If anyone else braved the movie, what was your reaction: empathy or disgust?
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Comments (13)
I've mellowed quite a bit from my days growing up in a church that said all movies are "worldly," but I still think our journey in biblical sanctification calls for us to be careful in our choices in entertainment.
(Confession: I did see "Paul Blart: Mall Cop," which also had some cute moral truth hidden in it...)
Have you ever actually walked out of a movie screening? Or do you have a sworn duty to sit through all this dross week by week?
Personally, I love the Fast Forward button, especially if there are subtitles still visible as I scan along the dull parts. Not many films are really worth the full two hours it takes to sit through them! But some are worth more...
As to some of the other comments, a few of you have mentioned that "Observe and Report" doesn't interest you unless Ronnie, the main character, shows some sort of redemptive potential by the end. Which makes me wonder, can a film that doesn't offer an inkling of redemption be of value to the Christian viewer, or is that the bottom line for what's "acceptable"?
I guess my question is, how does a film with little redemption portray that lack of hope? How does it feel about the broken darkness? Is it a lament and cry for justice? Is it gut-wrenchingly nihilisticly empty? Is it absurd? funny? Just sick for the fun of it?
A film that achieves empathy with twisted image-bearers does ineed achieve something important for Christians to experience, but it that enough? And at what cost? Does the film suggest that wallowing in sickness is the state of humankind, and that's OK?
I'd be much more impressed if we got empathy and then some transformation, with at least some reflections of Divine light sneaking through.
That's a key question. It make me re-think my comment at the top of this thread--perhaps too dismissive. Corny, tacked-on sentimental redemption is a Hollywood cliche and movies that avoid it may be better, more honest, and more worthwhile than movies that don't. 'Observe and Report' may even have been consciously subverting the Hollywood norm. (I also thought after posting my comment that maybe the Seth Rogen character could serve as a useful satire of the bullying, trigger-happy Bush Administration).
So I certainly won't require a happy or hopeful ending of any film I watch. But my question for films that linger on moral repugnance without remains this: what's the point? If showing us the brokenness of the world, without sugarcoating anything, can enhance our understanding and lament of brokenness and illuminate its intricacies, that's helpful (and in those cases, don't sanitize reality by toning down language and violence). Those aims may sound pretty high-minded; but without them, there's a huge risk in merely exploiting and indulging in brokenness.
Last thought: the same reviewers who talked me out of seeing 'Observe and Report' talked me into thinking I should see 'Sin Nombre,' (www.bit.ly/MZMh0) a dark, violent, depressing moving with apparently little redemptive hope, but which (from the sound of it) holds up a mirror to brokenness in the world, gives context to the often two-dimensional immigration debate, and evokes earnest empathy for characters trapped in cycles of suffering even as they partly perpetuate those cycles.
Of course, the aims of these two movies are so different they can hardly be compared. But it is worth noting that the absence of redemption in one may be more disturbing than the absence of redemption in the other.