Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is back in Canada all week covering the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. We wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing coverage of TIFF 2023, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
Larry Charles is a solid comedy director. He’s able to skillfully produce a kind of high-level and high production-value studio comedy, and he especially excels at bringing a producer-star’s vision to the screen – a talent honed well on Seinfeld, working alongside Jerry Show Title and Larry David. That latter bit sounds like an asset, but it’s where the two problems that have plagued him in the years since Sasha Baron Cohen left him for presumably greener pastures lie. Charles is wholly dependent on his collaborators – pair him up with Cohen and you get Borat and Bruno (the less said about The Dictator, the better), but give him an aging Bob Dylan or a smug-ass Bill Maher and you get either Masked and Anonymous or Religulous, both their own particular breed of exasperating misfire. Leave him to his own devices and you get Army of One, which is a Nicolas Cage movie that features Russell Brand as Jesus and also, a movie that I am decently sure you were not aware existed until right this minute. His latest, Dicks: The Musical, teams him up with Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp, bringing their show Identical Fucking Twins from the UCB stage to the screen, which I imagine was pretty fucking funny in person.
The second problem is that Charles seems to be permanently stuck in 2007 and actively seeks out projects that reflect that era, much like a Bed Stuy ex-Vice writer who spends his weekends pilfering flea markets in order to try and find that one Sidekick model that looks like the one that broke a few months back when his ex-partner tossed it out the window during his hasty eviction from their couch. His provocations are aimed at a bland Moral Majority that hasn’t properly existed in this country since Bear Sterns went under, which is why Dicks, which premiered in 2014, has made its way to multiplexes some six years after its sell-by date. This is where I acknowledge that I’m an old ass man and say that I probably would have found this movie funny and shocking or whatever descriptor A24’s going to use in order to sell this to folks had it come out six months after Borat, but at that time the idea of a profane musical was still (relatively) fresh and gay marriage – much less pop culture’s open embrace of once-underground aspects of queer culture – was a hot-button political issue. Yet now we live in a world where a movie like Bottoms can be an indie hit and receive cover stories in New York, and where Barbie can gross over a billion dollars with only minor bleats from conservative reactionaries. The most relevant part of Dicks is its opening title cards, which takes a shot at the marketing for Billy Eichner’s Bros in an unsubtle (and particularly funny) fashion.
For the remaining 90 minutes, Dicks strokes its audience vigorously, looking at them with the same kind of panicked frustration that is usually accompanied by a “This never normally happens.” Its plot is just a low-grade twist on The Parent Trap, in which two identical twins (Jackson and Sharp, who avoid the easy route of just being fraternal twins to try and wring out as many “They don’t look alike, actually” laughs as they can get), separated at birth, attempt to get their parents back together. Instead of being dual Lindsey Lohans, Jackson and Sharp are grown-ass hyper-masculine salesmen who discover their shared origin when their companies merge and they’re forced to compete against each other by their boss, Megan Thee Stallion.
It’s at that point that they begin to plan their big scheme to get their folks back together and get the nuclear family that they’ve always dreamed of, by impersonating the other (shitty wig and all) and coaxing their parents into a meeting at a very romantic New York restaurant. Each of them finds that their expectations of their respective unknown parent were wholly unfounded. Dad (Nathan Lane, having fun) is “queer as a three dollar bill, and just as thin,” and has devoted himself to taking care of his “sewer boys,” a pair of mutants he found in the NYC sewer system. Mom (Megan Mullaly) is wheelchair-bound, ancient, surrounded by knick-knacks in an Edie Beale fashion, and well on her way into old-age insanity. But maybe the fulfillment the boys have always needed is within each other – and yes, the movie means it like that. Just look at the damn original title. Oh, and Bowen Yang is God, for some reason.
Anyway, musically, Dicks is decent: the songs are solid parodies of the Broadway form and, with the exception of Mullally (saddled with an accent that prevents half of her dialogue from being understood), they’re well-performed, although that’s basically a given when you have Nathan Lane in your cast. As a comedy, however, it’s basically a feature-length proof as to why it is so fucking hard to bring this particular kind of modern stage-show to the screen. This kind of UCB bit depends on an enthusiasm feedback loop: Charismatic live performers can say outrageous shit, get a laugh, and be inspired to say even more outrageous shit, made all the more extreme by the visceral nature of live performance. Translating that energy to the screen is a hard task, and Charles’ solution is to simply glitz it up. There’s an element of polish here that is unflattering to the form, one present enough that it almost feels like the blooper reel that plays over the credits – a first for an A24 film, I believe – is meant to try and recapture some of that feeling you’d get on stage from watching an actor break. But one can’t really bring that to the screen, and those who have, including the UCB founders themselves, applied their skills differently, emphasizing other aspects of their comedy than just their sheer manic enthusiasm to be doing their stage show for the cameras. The thesis seems to be that if a given bit doesn’t work, yelling it louder will ultimately finally bring the house down.
Yet ultimately Dicks‘ failure has more to do with Charles than it has to do with its performers or its writers. His brand of comedy lives and dies with how it flips the bird at politeness and decency, but manners have, in fact, changed. For a not-too-brief moment, he was on the cutting edge of narrative comedy, both televisual and cinematic, challenging lumpen piety for plentiful laughs. But that time has passed him by, so fast that he’s still hurling barbs at the old targets like a D-list comic telling Spiro Agnew jokes at a sparsely populated club during the Clinton administration. Take, for instance, the final number, which features the twins (and God) leading the crowd in a song about how “love is gross” but “love is love,” and asking the audience to join in during its most profane moment. Without getting too deep into the weeds of it, some shit is said that would have really pissed off Jerry Falwell, had he lived to see it. But that faction of the right is much stranger these days – one only need to look at Liberty University’s various scandals to see proof of it – and Dicks is unlikely to draw that same kind of furious anger and controversy that Charles’ filmography usually attempts to stoke for amusement and profit. And you can’t just blame shrinkage on Dicks being so soft.