The Night Before (2015)

The Night Before arrives as a Christmas comedy about three childhood friends who reunite each Christmas Eve, a ritual born in the aftermath of a shared tragedy and sustained, in the later years, mostly by marijuana and sentiment. Jonathan Levine directs with the loose, ambling rhythm of a hangout picture, and the result is a film that wants us to laugh at bad behavior and then feel something about male friendship before the credits roll. It mostly succeeds, which is a modest achievement for a movie in which a man vomits on a church floor during Midnight Mass.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a curious artifact from the mid-2010s, a moment when ensemble comedies had quietly diversified their casts without yet feeling obliged to announce it. Anthony Mackie stands alongside Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as one of the three leads, while Mindy Kaling, Randall Park, Ilana Glazer, and Lorraine Toussaint fill out the margins. None of this is remarked upon. The film has no interest in racial identity as a subject, and the diversity functions as texture, not thesis. Female characters receive flashes of honesty, most notably when Diana rejects a public proposal with a clear-eyed account of why it was made, but the camera belongs to the boys and their anxieties.

A mild sermon is buried here about growing up, about the fear of fatherhood and the fear of being left behind, though it arrives through slapstick and drug hallucinations, so it never quite feels like a lecture. The supernatural turn involving Michael Shannon's dealer is played for warmth instead of meaning. The result is a competent holiday comedy that neither challenges nor offends, content to let its inclusive casting speak quietly for itself while everyone else gets high. Agreeable, forgettable, and entirely of its era.