You have a kind of sick desperation in your laugh.
In his autobiography Everything I Needed to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from The Toxic Avenger, Lloyd Kaufman (perhaps apocryphally) quotes “Li’l Abner” cartoonist Al Capp as having uttered, “All humor is based in cruelty.” His career is yet young, but Jody Hill thus far would seem to agree with that. With his features The Foot Fist Way and Observe and Report, as well as his work on the television show Eastbound and Down, Hill demonstrates a fascination with finding the exact division point between laughter and pain for the purpose of dancing on it en pointe. Observe and Report, his latest film, is a more successful venture than his debut Foot Fist in this regard, if only because Seth Rogen’s blinkered mall-cop Ronnie has an element of the tragic about him in his thorough misunderstanding of his station in life; while Danny McBride, as Fred Simmons the delusional tae kwon do instructor in Foot Fist, comes off merely as a pathetic raging asshole, there’s a sadness in Ronnie’s plight that stems partly from his struggles with mental illness and partly from Rogen’s unshakable natural charisma (he doesn’t have an aggressive persona, which is why his role here works as a nicely thought-out bit of counter-type casting while also softening the brutality of the humor just enough). That said, it’s still a pretty bitter pill - Hill is working with a more consistent rhythm and a somewhat more sympathetic protagonist, but he’s still mining laughs from parental neglect, blatant racism, thuggishness, violence, drug abuse, loneliness, misery, and the gleeful crushing of dreams by authority figures. (There’s also the rape thing, but that’s been covered far too well elsewhere.)
The film’s most extraordinary sequence, though, comes at the film’s end, when everything that has been denied Ronnie suddenly gets handed to him all at once in a big cordon bleu of smirking revenge. What impressed me about this wasn’t just its graceful construction (Hill has advanced quite a ways in his visual compositions and use of editing) but its nebulous nature. I’ve read reviews that dismiss this as a needlessly neat tying-up of ends, to which I can only say: Well, yeah, except maybe it’s on purpose. There’s a sense that this balancing of the cosmic scales is too perfect to be true, that it could all be in the realm of fantasy. If you’ve seen it, think about the song that’s playing during Ronnie’s dreamy pursuit of the flasher. Then think about the last time that song popped up in a film’s climactic moments. See where that takes you.
