The Sitter (2011)

David Gordon Green's The Sitter arrived in 2011 with modest ambitions and met them at a slight deficit. Jonah Hill plays Noah, a suspended college student who takes a babysitting gig only to drag three children across New Jersey in pursuit of cocaine and a romantic payoff. The plot is a shaggy chase, the reviews were unkind, and the box office was adequate. This is a raunchy studio comedy of the pre-streaming era, and its cultural footprint is faint.

The film does contain a handful of moments that register on the modern sensitivity meter. Slater, the anxious older boy, is revealed to be gay, and Noah delivers a short speech assuring him that there is nothing wrong with this. The beat is genuine, if brief, and it sits inside a movie that otherwise has no interest in sexual politics. Slater's anxiety disorder is named and medicated, and Rodrigo's pyromania is treated as a running gag. The cast includes Black and Latino performers, and one child is adopted from El Salvador, but the film never pauses to comment on any of it. These elements exist as texture, not thesis.

Where the movie drifts toward sermonizing is in its closing stretch, when the night's chaos resolves into life lessons and Noah learns to be less of a lout. It is soft moralizing, the standard third-act redemption of the American comedy. Beyond that, the film is a vacuum. No environmental conscience, no critique of wealth, no body politics, no reworking of history. It wants only to be funny, and by most accounts it failed at that, which leaves us with a curious artifact: a comedy with a few progressive gestures and no convictions to hold them together. We file it accordingly.