Category | Arts & Living

“Zack and Miri” make the movie

Published on February 24, 2009 by Daniel Singleton

What can I say? This movie surprised the hell out of me. It would have been easy for Kevin Smith to make a dirty sex comedy that coaxed us into laughing by telling boob jokes, but instead he decided to challenge himself by adding something that nobody—least of all me—expected to see in a movie about two thirty-something slackers who save themselves from eviction by making a porn film: a heart the size of Texas. The risk paid off.

“Zack and Miri Make a Porno” isn’t just the funniest comedy that I’ve seen all year and a movie that makes unworkable jokes work; it has so much heart that it makes “Knocked Up” look soulless. It might be Smith’s best movie.

Like all great movies, it’s also kinda sneaky, hiding its fuzzy heart until the last act. The first hour is pure comedy: raunchy, clever and envelope-pushing, silly and sweet. Smith drops clues that the porn-sex will eventually lead to love, but until then, he keeps the vibrator jokes front and center. He wants us to think that we’re only watching a silly sex comedy. He wants to distract us with laughter, so we don’t realize how much we care about Zack and Miri. He wants us to wonder when, where and why we fell in love with them. 

Yeah, I probably should have known better, especially since I’ve seen enough movies to know that the title characters usually end up together. I guess it’s hard to think ahead when the movie has you doubled over with laughter. Still, I can’t pretend that there’s anything groundbreaking about the plot, which follows the same time-tested formula (Boy and Girl are good friends until wacky events make them realize that they love each other and need to get married—until more wacky events threaten to keep them apart) that all romances have to follow if they want to avoid painful deaths at the box office. 

What makes this movie special is Zack and Miri. No, they don’t look interesting at first—just two more slackers who spend most of their time watching zombie movies in a dinky apartment. But don’t complain. The casualness is the reason we love them so much. Most characters in romances look like sex gods from Venus and talk like they grew up reading Shakespearean sonnets.

Zack and Miri look, talk and act like real people (even though Seth Rogen is sweeter than most guys and Elizabeth Banks is cuter than most girls), and while their “live now, worry later” attitude almost lands them in the poor house, it makes them easier to love than workaholics like that girl from “Sweet Home Alabama.” It also helps that Smith never shoves them through embarrassing meet cutes that practically kick us into loving them. He lets their personalities win us over.

But enough about the romance. Let’s talk about the jokes—the filthy, filthy jokes. Smith says that he thinks sex is dirty, but you wouldn’t know it from “Zack and Miri,” which practically swims in sex humor. (Sample line: “I’m a guy. Give me two Popsicle sticks and a rubber band and I’ll find a way to fuck it, like a filthy MacGyver.”) It’s not very sophisticated, but at least give Smith some credit for realizing that dirty words and morbid actions are only funny when they’re used as punctuation-spice words that make the sentence taste better. That’s why we never see Zack testing his MacGyver skills. His attitude toward sex (take it where and when you can get it and don’t ask questions) is what makes the scene funny, not the gross mental pictures. 

I expected to laugh during this movie. But I didn’t expect to care about the characters half as much as I did. It confused me. Dirty sex comedies shouldn’t be this powerful, I thought. Something had to be wrong. So I saw it again. While the jokes lost some of their zing, the romance still sucked me in so deeply that I forgot about the outside world, forgot about my own romantic problems, forgot about the three research papers I have to write by the end of next week, forgot about everything that wasn’t Zack and Miri. Some movies play with your heart. This one steals it.