"Bad Words"

Jason Bateman’s directorial debut drives a richly promising premise down a rickety road before taking a more predictable turn and parking it in a ready-made plastic garage. Initially appearing to fully embrace the fact that Bateman’s antihero Guy Trilby – a bitter forty year-old man inspired by a mysterious past trauma to abuse a loophole that allows him to participate in a national spelling bee contest – is one of the most odious protagonists of the year, screenwriter Andrew Dodge makes the audience laugh in shock at his nasty and frequently bigoted insults before settling for a hackneyed been-there-done-that tale of the cold-hearted cynic who softens and finds redemption through the power of  friendship with a minority kid. In this case, the kid in question is 10 year-old Indian-American competitor Chaitanya (Rohan Chand), the kind of annoying child prodigy that only exists in freewheeling independent comedies attempting to ape Wes Anderson without truly understanding what makes his films work – as also exemplified by a “fun times” montage featuring slow-motion shots and upbeat Beastie Boys song, reminiscent of the “Me And Julio Down The Schoolyard” montage in The Royal Tenenbaums, ironically one of Anderson’s lesser films. The relationship itself ends up degenerating to a bitter conflict that brings to mind the comically serious romantic rivalry between Max Fischer and Herman Blume in Rushmore, but fails to get as much laughs due to its contrived nature.

Visually, Bateman’s film is bathed in soft beige-ish tones that originally provide a nice contrast with the harshness of Guy’s words and feelings, until they become a warrant for its facile backtracking into crowd-pleasing sentimentality. His direction’s simultaneous support of Guy and acknowledgement of his awfulness becomes problematic as the dirty deceits he uses to break challengers’ concentration – which range from convincing a boy that he slept with his mother to tricking a girl into thinking she’s having her first period – become increasingly cruel. It would have befitted Bateman to treat Guy with the same balance of brutal honesty and compassion with which Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody treated Mavis Gary in Young Adult, for his Freudian excuse to find emotional resonance. More damningly, by allowing the story to sidetrack into a corny “odd friendship between man and boy” story, Bad Words sidesteps a target offered by its premise on a golden platter: The typically American capitalist fascination with competition and triumph over adversity, something Hollywood has contributed to perhaps more than any other American institution. Since Bateman and Dodge are unable to fully engage the socio-political implications offered by their setup, Guy’s use of misogynistic, homophobic and racist jabs (he frequently addresses Chaitanya by the nickname “Slumdog” among other pleasantries) as a fig-leaf to hide his misery unintentionally parallels the filmmakers’ own use of would-be shock humour as a substitute rather than support for substance.

The only truly offensive aspect of the film is its prevalent misogyny: Aside from Philip Baker Hall’s snooty Dr. Bowman, the majority of the film’s killjoy figures, from Allison Janney’s dogged spelling director to Beth Grant’s unamused hotel clerk and Rachael Harris’s outraged mother, are all women. And when women are not actively opposing Guy’s antics and mocked by the filmmakers for doing so, they’re either means for the two male leads to bond (Guy’s idea of a rite of passage for Chaitanya is to pay a poor overweight black prostitute to show him her voluminous breasts) or to simultaneously advance the plot and provide a reward for the protagonist’s triumph and good behaviour (Kathryn Hahn, whose incredible performance in Afternoon Delight I raved about here, gets some laughs but ultimately little to do as a needy journalist following Guy around and whose trysts with him are hampered by her inability to orgasm while looking at him). These two particular examples of misogyny are less a fundamental element of the film than the consequences and illustration of Andrew Dodge falling prey to the same excessive triumphalism his screenplay tries to subvert; Guy may end up losing the bee contest but he still triumphs over his issues, humiliates his enemy and gains a friend and a love interest as a reward. The only difference between this film’s “moral victory” and the one that ended Rocky is that Rocky Balboa’s moral victory was the emotionally resonant culmination of very lifelike people’s feelings and desires.

Jason Bateman, usually accommodated to playing put-upon nice guys, elevates much of his material with an unapologetically harsh, in-your-face performance that suggests he may have understood that the humour of Guy’s character and situations is derived from an acknowledgement of his misery.  More’s the pity that the film’s screenplay, and his treatment of at least half of it, says otherwise.