Shawn Levy (2010)
Phil and Claire Foster (Steve Carell and Tina Fey), a fortyish couple from New Jersey with two kids, have ‘dates’ together to try and put some pep back into their marriage. They go to local eating places, where they watch other couples and enjoy speculating about the state of their relationships. (This is presumably meant to show the vacancy of the Fosters’ life together, although I’m not sure it does: when Carell and Fey put on voices to imagine what the other diners are saying, they’re too inventive to be despicable.) One night, the sexy dress Claire puts on for their outing moves Phil to impulsiveness: he insists on taking his wife to a swanky new restaurant in Manhattan, although it’s an hour’s drive to Tribeca and Claire is sure they’ll never get a table. They duly don’t but the snotty official at the desk tells them to wait in the bar in case there any cancellations. When another member of staff comes round calling a table for two for ‘the Tripplehorns’, Phil claims it – a moment of dishonesty that gets the Fosters into mistaken identity territory and a tour of New York’s nocturnal underbelly they’ll never forget. During the couple’s night on the town, they’re mixed up with a mobster, a corrupt DA and bent cops, and embroiled in a series of action-comedy set pieces, chief and worst of which is an endless car chase and pile-up.
I went to see Date Night because of Steve Carell, whom I really like, and Tina Fey, whom I’d never seen before but wanted to see. I didn’t expect much from the film as a whole and I got less. The dialogue is feeble: reasonably typical is a repeated gag – mildly funny the first time but quickly tedious – that has other characters, all criminally experienced, expressing shock that the Fosters lied to get their table in the restaurant. Shawn (Night(s) in the Museum) Levy puts up a series of out-takes to accompany the closing credits. Of course bloopers can be funny but a film must be a failure when they make you laugh more than the ninety-odd minutes of comedy they’re appended to. As David Denby’s New Yorker review points out, the basic joke in Date Night is the same one as in The Out-of-Towners – made in 1970 with Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis, remade in 1999 with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn, as suburban misadventurers in New York. I don’t know how much non-American audiences will understand New Jersey to be a comic premise per se but Levy and the screenwriter Josh Klausner are taking no chances. The Fosters are given quintessentially boring jobs – he’s a tax consultant, she’s an estate agent – to leave no doubt about their dreariness.
David Denby’s review also notes, accurately, that the material seems designed for the timid non-sophisticates whom the Fosters represent: while they may seem the butt of the joke, they end up defeating the vicious might of the bad big city and, needless to say, rediscovering how much they love each other. There didn’t seem much wrong with their relationship to me in any case, except for the lack of any cultural conversation that might have helped ring the changes in how they fill the silence when they go out together. At the end, Phil reveals that he always reads what Claire is reading for her book group, ‘Because they’re important to you’. She confesses she reads only the first few pages and the last one, and we’re meant to think that Phil is a fool for love: after all, asks Claire, ‘Who has time to read books?’ His thoughtfulness seems wasted effort not because it’s time-consuming but because he and his wife appear never to have a conversation about the books anyway.
Except for the odd flicker of light in her eyes, Tina Fey is disappointingly impersonal – she seems to have got a type of character down pat rather than created an individual. The part of Claire is poorly written, it’s true, but no more so than the part of Phil, which Steve Carell does much more with. It’s his lack of vanity, as well as his comic precision, that makes Carell such a likeable performer. His acting here verges on the miraculous – he gives Phil depth, which isn’t in the writing, but it’s an essentially light-hearted depth. It takes a lot of skill to achieve and sustain that kind of balance. The noisy stupidity of Date Night is modified by the charm of Carell’s playing and by the brief appearances of two other very talented people we meet along the way. Mark Ruffalo is the husband of a couple the Fosters are friends with and who are breaking up. James Franco is some kind of lowlife. While I was sorry to see them in this junk, it’s good they come through as vividly as they do, Franco especially. The well-known names in the cast also include Ray Liotta (as the mobster boss), Taraji P Henson (as a detective) and Mark Wahlberg (as a security expert whose musculature seems to generate around one gagline in every three).
2 May 2010
