I watched Tower Heist (2011) and Wanderlust (2012) over the last couple of days (and by that I might actually mean a single day since I have a deadline coming up and watching films is my avoidance strategy). Both were highly entertaining even if not absolutely crackling. Once upon a time, I might have kept the knowledge of my viewing and my enjoyment of these films to myself but of late, I’ve begun to think that we are better off being more open about our collective if unacknowledged love of the middlebrow.
In Tower Heist, the employees of an exclusive New York City apartment complex (clearly modelled on Trump Tower) find out that their pensions have been lost to a Ponzi scheme run by one of the residents, a wealthy Wall Street businessman named Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda) who also owns the penthouse. Headed by the building’s former manager, Josh Kovaks (Ben Stiller), the employees band together and plot to get their money back and then some. The movie is fairly typical of its genre and like the Ocean’s Eleven franchise features an array of stars of various intensities, including Casey Affleck, Matthew Broderick, Tea Leoni, Eddie Murphy, and Gabourey Sidibe. But where Ocean’s Eleven and its progeny engage in a knowing wink about the sheer coolness of the ensemble cast (to excellent effect), Tower Heist’s cast and characters take the premise and plot seriously (also successfully). The result is a very funny film that includes some excellent bits, like a scene where Kovaks is vainly trying to get everyone to understand the intricacies of the heist to come but has to deal with all the would-be thieves getting lost in the detail that a couple of the complex’s employees are lesbians. It all ends with what should go down as one of the best lines in cinema, “So it seems like there’s a gauntlet of lesbians.”
In Wanderlust, George and Linda Gergenblatt (Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston) are two New Yorkers who buy a “microloft” (a puffy term for a studio apartment) at the wrong time, just before he loses his job. Linda’s career aspirations are all over the place — her most recent endeavour is a documentary about a penguin with testicular cancer which she pitches to two HBO executives who roundly reject it as too depressing: “We do violence and heartache,” snips the woman in charge, “But it’s sexy.” Driving out of their New York life, Linda and George find themselves in a commune outside Atlanta, Georgia, on their way to live with George’s ferociously nasty if successful and deeply suburban brother Rick (Ken Marino) and his wife Marisa (Michaela Watkins). The latter is never without a glass in her hands and drops lines in a way that could be drunken reverie or deep sarcasm, or both. In response to a compliment, she says, “Thanks. I read this article that said if you smile all the time, you can trick your brain into thinking that you’re happy.” Later, while showing Linda the many rooms in her enormous house, she gestures to a shelf and lets forth a stream of unfiltered thoughts that only a desperate suburban wife might express, “I have a dildo in here. Feel free to use it and know that it’s clean because I put it through the dishwasher like Whoopi says to do … Do you like hamburgers? Rick’s going to grill some hamburgers this weekend. I have mixed feelings about being a parent.”
George and Linda go back and forth about whether or not they want to join the commune — the hellscape that is the reality of Rick and Marisa’s life drives them to ponder the decision, and the bohemian space has a set of idiosyncratic characters that includes a white woman Almond (Lauren Ambrose) who feels compelled to point out that she’s married to a Black man, Rodney (Jordan Peele), a nudist winemaker Wayne (Joe Lo Truglio), and the patriarch of the place Carvin (Alan Alda).
What makes both movies enjoyable is that they take themselves seriously without overinflating their importance. What I liked about them is that the actors respect their material and give it their all. Wanderlust has a scene with Rudd trying to perform a version of masculinity his character is clearly unfamiliar with (he’s about to try and have sex outside his marriage for the first time and thinks he needs to be a certain kind of dude to make himself attractive and to commit infidelity): his brain and tongue refuse to work together to form the words that he’s practiced in the mirror just hours before (in a bathroom with no doors because, commune). As with Tower Heist, the ensemble cast works as well as it does because the actors take their roles seriously, without trying to wink and nod at the camera. A Meryl Streep in the middle of either film would have been disastrous, for instance, as she chewed the scenery and insisted on making the audience pay attention to her overblown and overly thespianised performance as An Actor.
I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with Trevor Beaulieu on the Champagne Sharks podcast, where we talked about how not every film or book needs to be some work of outstanding creative genius — and Trevor put it well when he said that we need to make more space for middlebrow art.
Middlebrow is not a bad thing, at all — arguably, it’s even necessary.* And a lot of middlebrow work — like these two films, or the Mission Impossible ones, or any number of novels that critics are apt to dismiss — are actually excellent in terms of how they construct their plots, create engrossing dialogue that isn’t pretentious dialogue, and maintain enough suspense to keep the viewer or reader hooked. Some purportedly highbrow work, on the other hand, expects that you should be bored to death on the Altar of Art. The surge in internet critique/criticism has meant that critics jostle to be gatekeepers who decide that a film is either something that reaches Kurosawan heights or mindless drivel that must not be watched, leaving little space for works that actually aspire to the middle and to do it well. Sometimes, all you want is an afternoon cinematic amble and it just needs to be done well, in a film that pays attention to details like dialogue and pacing without pretending to be something that will shatter your consciousness and change your life.
*There is, of course, a whole discussion to be had about who decides which brow falls where. Shakespeare was originally devoured by loud crowds of people generally falling around drunk over each other, and in parts of the world that are not the U.S, “high culture” like opera and art museums are priced to be affordable or free to all. If economic constraints did not prevent people from enjoying a range of art and culture, would we consume and judge art differently? Would critics even dare to think of these films as art?
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Image: Rembrandt, Scholar At His Writing Table, 1641