HUMPDAY

Rating

Director
Lynn Shelton
Screenplay
Lynn Shelton
Length
94 min.
Starring
Mark Duplass, Joshua Leonard, Alycia Delmore, Lynn Shelton, Trina Willard
MPAA Rating
R for some strong sexual content, pervasive language and a scene of drug use.

Review
Two childhood chums get back together when one of them has a crazy idea for an independent film that he wants them both to appear in. Yet, the premise gives both of them pause and makes them question their own masculinity and their immediate and conditioned response to the subject.

Andrew (Joshua Leonard) wants to make a guy-on-guy porno between two straight men. It’s an unusual idea he suggests, but he can’t think of anyone to ask, so he approaches an old friend to star in the film with him. Ben (Mark Duplass) is married, though not necessarily happily. The film opens with him and his wife Anna (Alycia Delmore) playing the perfect couple with no evident problems, but it’s a thin veneer that is stripped away fairly quickly.

Whenever Andrew is around, Ben acts like an imbecile, taking risks and forgetting about the world around him. It’s this attitude Anna immediately rejects. She prepares a nice dinner for the two but is angry when neither returns home after a drug-filled intellectual party at another of Andrews’ friends’ houses.

While under the influence, Ben agrees to Andrew’s proposal and they begin making plans, but Anna isn’t on the list of people to find out initially. When she is finally told, the drama presses forward as you would expect with her questioning and generally forbidding his participation. Then the tenor changes and the whole incident becomes about Ben’s inability to settle down and always seeming to find some reason to lash out at normalcy, angering Anna further.

The big question for the movie, however, is resolved in a nondescript hotel room as the two straight guys discuss their apprehension and attempt to figure out how exactly to proceed with their porn video.

I saw this movie very early in Oscar season just as I was receiving screeners, but hadn’t received so many I couldn’t get to them all. Yet, it’s one of the last films I’m writing up and there’s a reason. I just don’t know what to say about it. My first instinct was that this was just your garden-variety indie flick filled with verbose, unrealistic connective dialogue and outlandish situations meant to engage and evoke emotion from the audience.

Yet, there are some wise ideas embodied in the narrative, mostly in the hotel scene, wherein these men discuss their own fears and trepidations about being together sexually, even when they are performing the acts “professionally”.

I don’t love the film like many do. It’s a strong exercise for the medium, but it doesn’t feel as genuine or earnest as it might have had it been more down-to-earth in its dialogue. The issues I take with these films is when people who don’t seem like intellectuals and have periodically shown themselves not to be such within the narrative, suddenly wax philosophical on rather high-minded topics. It’s not to say that people in these situations cannot think in such ways, but when it feels so at-odds with the surroundings that it’s seemingly unrealistic, the film suffers.

Well above average, the performances of Duplass and Leonard are perfectly in sync with the narrative. These are uncomplicated characters who think deeply and question their roles in the world around them. Yet, they are so strongly rooted in their social and psychological environments that the mere concept of doing something so antithetical to all they’ve learned becomes difficult even when success, fame and money are on the line.

If you can sit down and take Humpday as an intellectual’s examination of how society can limit our interactions with our own gender based on stereotype and negative reinforcement, then you will take something strong and important from this film. If you aren’t looking for that kind of feature, then you probably won’t find this slow narrative that encouraging.
Review Written
April 28, 2010
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Humpday