Old School (2003)

Old School arrives from 2003, a Todd Phillips comedy about three men in their thirties who cannot locate their lost youth and so build a fraternity around the absence. The premise is thin, the beer is plentiful, and the film's ambitions extend no further than the next gag. It opened at number two behind Daredevil, which tells us something about the American appetite that February. Critics were mixed. Roger Ebert gave it one star. The film shrugged.

On the matter of social consciousness, the record is sparse. The cast is white to a degree that reads less like a decision than an oversight, with Sara Tanaka appearing as the student council president who is bribed with a law school admission, a plot function wearing a character's clothes. Snoop Dogg performs at a party. Neither presence carries any argument about representation, and the film would be baffled to hear otherwise. Women are girlfriends, conquests, or the objects of a fraternity's gaze, and the comedy depends entirely on that arrangement. Weensie, the overweight pledge, lands a vault, a fleeting acknowledgment that bodies vary in capability, played for a laugh and then abandoned. The sexual politics are aggressively heterosexual. No other reading is available.

Where the film proves instructive is nowhere. It lectures no one. It holds no thesis about capital, no interest in the climate, no historical claims to revise. It wants only to be funny, and it is funny roughly sixty percent of the time, a figure the tomato website reached independently. There is something almost restful about a comedy this uninterested in improving its audience. We classify it accordingly: a period piece, and not the kind anyone intended to make.