Role Models (2008)

Role Models arrives from 2008, a year when a mainstream studio comedy could still be assembled from energy drinks, a Minotaur truck, and two grown men sentenced to a big-brother program. David Wain directs with the loose, shaggy indifference of a man who has decided that plot is a rumor. Paul Rudd plays Danny, a salesman so weary of his own product that he cannot summon the energy to propose marriage without wrecking it. Seann William Scott plays Wheeler, who can. The film's pleasures are crude and its ambitions are smaller still.

Which is precisely the point. The film surrounds itself with a Black child actor, a lawyer played by Elizabeth Banks, a recovering addict played by Jane Lynch, and a LARP kingdom full of grown men in foam armor, and it never once pauses to instruct us on what any of this means. Ronnie is vulgar because he is a vulgar child. Augie is shy and obsessed with medieval role-play because that is his hobby, not a diagnosis. Danny's contempt for his dead-end sales job reads as personal malaise, not a thesis about commerce. Nobody in this film is a lesson. Everybody is a punchline, and the film loves them anyway.

To sit through it now is to feel the absence of a certain nervous energy, the sense that a comedy must justify its existence with a moral. Role Models justifies itself with a Kiss-themed truck and a running gag about a fake Wings song. It is a relic, and an agreeable one. The cultural ledger remains blank. Some films simply want to be funny. This one succeeds, and asks for nothing in return.