Hiring David Gordon Green—a Terrence Malick/Charles Burnett disciple whose films play to niche audiences, even in arthouse cinemas—to direct a mainstream action comedy about two stoners who go on the run after witnessing a murder? It’s the kind of idea that you’d only come up with if you were high—and for all I know, that’s precisely the state actor/screenwriter Seth Rogen and producer Judd Apatow were in when they called Green up and asked him to be a part of Pineapple Express.But Green always had an affinity for lowbrow “dude” comedy. My old paper, Vue Weekly, interviewed Green when All the Real Girls came out—it’s embarrassing, but I truly can’t remember if I did the interview or if my pal (and fellow blogger) Josef Braun did, and now I can’t find the file online or on my computer—but I do remember being struck by Green’s response when Josef or I asked him what movies he’d seen recently and liked. “Old School!” he responded—a surprising endorsement from a guy whose movies had very little frathouse spirit about them.
Anyone who’s looking for them can spot the David Gordon Green touches throughout Pineapple Express—his spirit is there in the smeary, blurry freeze-frames that end several of the scenes; in dreamy slow-motion interludes like Seth Rogen and James Franco’s bumbling trek through the forest or the montage of clumsy dance moves they perform in a back alley for a bunch of kids they’ve just sold some weed to; in all sorts of throwaway moments like the shot of the little girl in thick eyeglasses and a bathing suit watching Franco through a fence as he sits in a playground swing, sobbing his heart out as he wolfs down a cheeseburger.
Franco, whose career has been derailed by a string of pretty-boy roles in movies like Tristan and Isolde, Annapolis, and Flyboys, gives a performance here that’s almost as much of a who-knew-he-had-it-in-him? revelation as Heath Ledger’s turn as The Joker in The Dark Knight. He plays Saul, a heavy-lidded, greasy-haired stoner who still bears dim traces of the nice Jewish boy he used to be before he got into pot dealing as a way of paying for his grandmother’s retirement home. The key to Franco’s performance may be the way he suggests Saul’s loneliness—there’s a telling bit early on in the film where he tries (sweetly, pathetically) to persuade Seth Rogen’s Dale to hang around his apartment for a few minutes longer. “Be my friend!” he might as well be saying. “Please by my friend!” When Dale cruelly informs him that he’s not Saul’s friend, he’s his customer, it’s the most emotionally devastating moment in the film.
Not that the film is what you’d call a weepie, exactly. It’s more like the kind of movie where guys get heavy glass ashtrays thrown at their head, where one character sticks his face in a bag of premium-grade weed and announces it smells “like God’s vagina,” and where no greater karmic punishment can be imagined than being reincarnated as an anal bead. (There are subtler jokes in here too—I like the way, for instance, that Green never underlines the irony that the secret government testing lab where marijuana was first declared an illegal substance gets a second life as a state-of-the-art grow facility. And I liked the way all of Rogen and Franco’s most paranoid suspicions turn out to be true: the cops really can use a discarded joint to trace their whereabouts; they really can triangulate their cellphone signals; every authority figure really is out to get them.)
I’m not sure whether to credit the script (by Rogen and his Superbad collaborator Evan Goldberg), the actors, Green’s direction, or producer Judd Apatow, but I might as well credit all of them for the way all the dialogue, even the funniest jokes, feels as if it were made up on the fly, as if the actors were all tapping into the same comic vibe hanging over the set like a cloud... not to be confused with the miasma of pot smoke also lingering over the heads of everyone in the cast, and possibly most of the crew.
The last half hour of Pineapple Express is surprisingly violent—so much so that it threatens to dispel the good mood generated by the first 90 minutes. It almost seems like a fundamental violation of the rules of the stoner film to show characters actually getting hurt, and even dying. But that initial discomfort is soon replaced by delight—even elation—when you realize how well-staged all the violence is. No lie: Pineapple Express contains three major action scenes, all of them more exciting and visually coherent than anything in The Dark Knight.
And then, Green finds a way to bring the film back down to earth. The final scene finds our three heroes (Rogen, Franco, and Danny McBride, who played Bust-Ass in All the Real Girls, will also be featured in Tropic Thunder later this summer, and seems poised to become the year’s big comic discovery) sitting in a diner, having apparently crawled their from the flaming wreckage of the film’s climactic showdown, their hair thick with blood, dirt smeared across their face, scarfing down eggs and sausage and laughing over the events of the film as if they had already become just one more wild anecdote about “that time we got so high....”
If they can even remember anything that happened once they sober up.
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