From left, Molly Quinn, Will Poulter, Kathryn Hahn, Emma Roberts, Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis and Nick Offerman in “We’re the Millers.”Credit...Michael Tackett/Warner Brothers Pictures We're the MillersDirected by Rawson Marshall ThurberComedy, CrimeR1h 50m
“We’re the Millers,” a loose, halfheartedly raunchy, occasionally hilarious new comedy, is about a lot of different things; it’s the usual grab bag of jokes about drugs and body parts. But what really drives the movie is its own search for something to make fun of, and for a comic style that can feel credibly naughty while remaining ultimately safe and affirmative. The filmmakers — a crew that includes the director of “DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story” and writing teams that worked on “Wedding Crashers” and “Hot Tub Time Machine” — want to beat up on the squares while leaving open the option of joining them in the end. Their primary challenge, therefore, is figuring out just who, in our polarized, homogenized, thoroughly confused culture, the squares might be. Married white people with children? That seems plausible, but also perhaps a little broad, so the movie settles on the demographic subcategory of married white people with children and recreational vehicles. Bull’s-eye! Or maybe not, since technically you could apply that description to Walter White in the first season of “Breaking Bad.” The joke here is that a bunch of misfits — a small-time drug dealer, a stripper, a street urchin and a slack-jawed latchkey kid — successfully impersonate an all-American nuclear family touring the West in a large, gleaming camper. In the course of a mission to transport a few tons of illegal marijuana from Mexico to Denver, these four become the very thing they are mocking. David Clark (Jason Sudeikis), a shaggy slacker, shaves his stubble and trades jeans and T-shirts for polos and khakis. His pretend wife, Rose O’Reilly (Jennifer Aniston), who wears platinum wigs and leather G-strings at work, goes for ponytails and pedal pushers. Though they and their “kids,” Casey and Kenny (played by Emma Roberts and Will Poulter), are initially in it for the money, after a while they begin, predictably and almost convincingly, to care about one another. To have any hope of being funny, “We’re the Millers” must at once exaggerate and minimize the differences between its main characters and everyone else. David’s clients, after all, are housewives and office workers, and an old college pal with a minivan and a dad physique is happy to accept a free bud for old times’ sake. David’s boss (Ed Helms) is another college friend, grown into a yuppie kingpin whose style is more Google than Scarface. He sends David south of the border on what is surely, in light of Colorado’s current marijuana policy, a bit of a coals-to-Newcastle assignment. The inevitable appearance of a vicious Mexican drug lord (Tomer Sisley) and his ruthless minion (Matthew Willig) — lazy stereotypes that add nothing in the way of humor or interest — emphasizes what was already obvious, namely that David and Rose, in spite of their vice-tinged professions, were fairly ordinary middle-class Americans from the start. They really are the Millers, in other words. They just needed some time to figure it out. And the audience needs a way to pretend otherwise, a chance to imagine that this make-believe family’s ultimate normalization does not involve a total surrender to imaginary forces of conformity. The swearing and sexually frank dialogue is part of this pseudo-rebellious strategy, as is the mom-to-bombshell striptease, featured in the trailers, that Ms. Aniston performs to prove to the world that she has an amazing body. (Who has ever suggested otherwise?) The problem is that there is nothing terribly scandalous, at the present stage of our civilization, about the sight of Ms. Aniston’s bellybutton or the utterance of the phrase “anal sex.” And so “We’re the Millers” labors to invent characters who might find such things shocking, and they almost save the movie from its timid, conventional impulses. During their journey, the Millers meet Don and Edie Fitzgerald (Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn), R.V. enthusiasts with a teenage daughter (Molly Quinn). Don and Edie don’t curse, smoke weed or betray the slightest knowledge of popular culture (though their daughter is a sci-fi/fantasy aficionado). They are beyond square, which is to say that they are stranger, kinkier and more interestingly individual than David, Rose, Kenny or Casey. Ms. Hahn and Mr. Offerman are also funnier than Ms. Aniston or Mr. Sudeikis, though perhaps this goes without saying. A movie about the Fitzgeralds would have been more rewarding than “We’re the Millers,” and also much riskier. “We’re the Millers” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Drugs, dirty talk, a bit of gross anatomy. |
