Hall Pass is a Farrelly Brothers movie (Dumb & Dumber, There’s Something About Mary), which should tell you something about the movie off the bat. The Farrelly Brothers have the sense of humor akin to the kid who started swearing in the first grade — or who taught you about the birds and the bees two years later behind the back seat of the bus. While there is tamer and raunchier humor out there, what sets the Farrellys apart is the palpable enjoyment they seem to take in their own mischief, pushing buttons and crossing lines with self-congratulatory fanfare.
That said, the movie makers’ comedy is usually more hit than miss compared with similarly-styled comedies, and it packs a keen social punch. In fact, the problem with Hall Pass is that it creates such an unqualified dark and depressing vision of contemporary suburban life and marriage that the yucksters hardly have the imagination to pull us up and out of this purgatorial vision of the ‘burbs. Instead, we’re numbed with potty humor, sex jokes, and a madcap finale which falls short of inciting stitches.
Lest you think you’re in for a high school drama, the “hall pass” referred to in the film’s title is an agreement between husband and wife to take a break from marriage. Soon after we meet Rick (Owen Wilson) and Maggie (Jenna Fischer), they are bickering about how Rick shamelessly checks out other women. It is the first of a series of incidents that reveal an inside joke, a hidden secret among the film’s male characters. The men are all sexually unsatisfied in marriage, endowed with the overactive sexual imaginations of adolescents, and they secretly fantasize about the wild sexual escapades they would embark on but for their marriages. In one of the film’s most telling and depressing lines (also meant, of course, to provoke some laughter) Rick’s best friend Fred (Jason Sudeikis) says to Rick on a bench in a pristine park, “Did you ever think when you were 12 that you would still be masturbating after you were married.” The knowing look the two men exchange, both mischievous and melancholic, says it all.
Thanks to a couple of riotous incidents when the boys are caught talking openly about their unhappiness and their fantasies (at one point being caught on an ostentatious neighbor’s new security cameras, another when Rick mistakenly switches the baby monitors), Maggie decides that she will follow the advice of her psychologist friend and give Rick a hall pass. Soon, Fred’s wife Grace (Christina Applegate) follows suit, and the women leave town, leaving the boys free to follow their libidos.
The coming days bring some humorous moments wrapped in a perceptive psychological wink. Rick and Fred waste the majority of their time eating, drinking, or generally acting like junior high kids with their male friends. When they finally set to hunting women at a local bar, they are so obviously ill-equipped for seduction you can’t help but laugh at (and pity) them. Meanwhile, their more attractive and mature wives are the ones who attract adulterous temptation, the two women weighing their own marital happiness while fending off the pursuits of the players and a coach of a college baseball team.
Hall Pass isn’t all social commentary. Most of its effort is spent trying to shock and spur laughter out of the audience. In terms of sense of humor, the Farelly Brothers fall in squarely with their male leads. Rump, poop, and penis jokes abound, and fair warning for the faint hearted, there is one scene with full frontal male nudity that cracks jokes about the size of male genitalia.
If these shenanigans were all that Hall Pass was, it would fit in line with the many other perverted, puerile diversions that stand in for comedy these days. But Hall Pass proves surprisingly sensitive. Expectations and imaginations tempered by the hall pass experience, the movie’s on-screen characters figure out how to make their marriages work. The volume of laughter in the West Plano theater in which I saw the film, however, suggests that Hall Pass’s vision of marriage struck a chord. Unfortunately, Hall Pass is neither insightful nor cathartic, only offering the lonely husband the equivalent of another swig of Bud Light.
