The House (2017)

The House arrives with the wearying confidence of a studio comedy that believes a premise is a screenplay. Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler play Scott and Kate Johansen, suburban parents whose daughter is admitted to Bucknell and whose community scholarship evaporates at a town hall meeting. So they open an illegal casino in their neighbor's basement. That is the entire engine. Andrew J. Cohen directs with the flat competence of a man who has studied the form and forgotten the pleasure of it, and the film earned thirty-four million dollars against a forty million dollar budget, which is its own kind of verdict.

The progressive content here is thin and largely accidental. The cast is almost entirely white, with Cedric Yarbrough drifting through as a stressed suburbanite who gambles to unwind, and the film never asks a single question about him. Poehler co-leads, which is pleasant, but she spends the runtime as half of a married comedy duo, trading exasperated looks, and the script has no interest in gender beyond who gets to hold the money bag. Race, sexuality, climate, and body image go entirely unmentioned, which for a 2017 studio comedy is not a failing so much as a default setting.

Where the film gestures toward social awareness, it does so with a shrug. The tuition crisis motivates the plot, and a corrupt councilman embezzles the city budget, but these are gags with receipts, not arguments. Nobody sermonizes. Nobody halts the bacchanal to explain what it all means. The result is a comedy that offends no one and moves no one, a harmless artifact of a moment when a movie could still be about nothing at all. We classify it, we file it, we move on to the next one.

THEMATIC_TAGS: []

(Note: the review text above is the deliverable; thematic tags are empty because the film is not an Oscar winner, sequel, remake, true story, adaptation, superhero property, or a domestic box office number one.)