Review of Hall Pass (2011) by Shiira — 04 Mar 2011

"Hall Pass", similar to the grossly underrated "Shallow Hal"(arguably the best title in this filmmaking brothers' oeuvre, "There's Something About Mary" notwithstanding) serves up mean-spirited jokes at the expense of women who aren't, to put it kindly, classically beautiful, and should probably have been best left alone, rather than have a camera overstate their lack of sex appeal.

Maybe because Jack Black isn't classically beautiful himself, the 2001 film, in which a svelte Gwyneth Paltrow juxtaposes herself against a moribundly obese version of herself, somehow is able to get away with its aggressively misogynistic tone.

This time, the filmmakers aren't so lucky. In the film's arena of sexual politics, not only are the women punished for their desires and transgression, but the men as well, which is better than your typical Adam Sandler offering, and yet, the level playing field this filmmaking duo purportedly advocates seems to be enacted, not as a corrective measure against double standards, but rather, as a license to get away with murder.

"Shallow Hal", which featured the immortal line, "Don't be satisfied with routine p**ntang," the dying words imparted by a grandfather to a young Hal, may have been, in retrospect, equally hateful towards women, in light of this somewhat thematically similar offering, which does a poorer job of covering its tracks.

A film like Paul Weitz's "American Pie" was revolutionary in the sense that it depicted women with lax morals without them having to pay for their impertinent conduct through some corresponding humiliation.

The women, clearly, were ahead of the men. Clearly, that's not the case here. All in all, "Hall Pass" has the same nineteenth century sensibility so typical of many genre films, reflecting the reactionary attitudes of the distant past in regard to women and sex, in which a respected intellectual(British Particular Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon) could proclaim, "When the goose drinks as deep as the gander, the pots are soon empty, and the cupboards are bare.

" In the film's pivotal moment, goose number one, Maggie(Jenna Fischer), the woman who instigated this whole mess, tells the baseball coach, a man she could f*ck right then and there, that "this hall pass was never for him," the "him" being her husband with the wandering eye(played by Owen Wilson), as a set-up for the scene where the movie seemingly punishes Rick for wanting extra-marital physical relations, when the real estate agent comes home to what apparently sounds like Maggie taking liberties with the new rules.

For the time being, the filmmaker encourages the moviegoer to loathe her. That slut, you think, and in spite of his unrealistic expectations(he misses Maggie's younger self), you side with him and visualize along with him, his wife's illicit lovemaking with the near-stranger behind that door.

She's a mother of three, you think, that whore. That's the double standard. Female desire is no laughing matter, not like when Rick finds himself alone in a room with the hot girl who pours his coffee every morning at the cafe.

The filmmaker throws the bare-breasted Aussie at Rick, implicitly as a reward for not getting intimate with his kids' nubile babysitter. Now that would be creepy, getting it on with a twenty-year-old, so by comparison, sex with Leigh(Nicky Whelan) would be relatively moral.

But alas, Rick declines her offer, and then, sanctimoniously gives one of those patented speeches favored by the filmmaker in which the protagonist's inherent decency is supposed to cancel out all the rampant misogyny that preceded this sudden apologetic maneuver meant to placate the potentially offended female demographic.

This salve against mean-spiritedness can't reconcile the grotesquerie that is the woman with the diarrhea. Unlike Rick and Maggie, Fred and Grace(played by Jason Sudeikis and Christina Applegate) do take full-advantage of their marital exemption, and the difference in tone as it pertains to their respective sanction infidelities, is calibrated, as such, in accordance with the bylaws of the double standard.

When Fred has a one-night stand with a cougar, the chastening he gets from the filmmaker is tempered with comedy, as the older woman kicks him in the face, proceeded by gunfire, courtesy of the older woman's son.

His transgression is treated as hijinks. It's a completely different story for Grace. Not surprisingly, she's not allowed to enjoy her once-in-a-lifetime fling, since her sex partner, just a pup, is inexperienced, but to make matters worse, the minor league pitcher eviscerates her by bring up their comparative ages, after Grace, believing she has the upper-hand, lets him down gently and is made to be the fool.

The next time we see the woman, she's bawling in her car. As it turns out, she crashes.