Hall Pass (2011)

Hall Pass arrives from 2011, a vintage when the Farrelly brothers could still assemble a comedy around two married men and their week of sanctioned wandering. The premise concerns Rick and Fred, whose wives grant them seven days of freedom in the hope that a little rope will improve the marriage. What follows is a study in middle-aged anxiety, hot tubs, and the quiet terror of a man discovering he has been with exactly one woman his entire life. The film's resolution is not liberation but reconciliation, and its closing position is a warm endorsement of the domestic arrangement it spent ninety minutes pretending to escape.

The cast is a closed circle of white, middle-class suburbanites, and the film never glances outside it. No character's race registers as a subject, no environmental concern intrudes on the week's consumerist itinerary of bars and hotels, and no body is asked to be celebrated, only mocked or admired according to the usual comedic arithmetic. Queerness is absent entirely, since the whole dramatic engine runs on heterosexual marriage and its discontents. The women do initiate the arrangement, which grants the film a thin veneer of autonomy for its wives, but the narrative promptly returns them to the kitchen, the hospital bed, and the forgiving embrace. Nobody lectures. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no invitation to examine our assumptions.

Which leaves us with an artifact of modest cultural ambition and even more modest cultural awareness. It wants only to be a farce about husbands behaving badly and being forgiven. On the scale of social consciousness, this is a film that has not read the memo, has not been cc'd on the memo, and would probably find the memo a little preachy.