Gay Panic

Our critic considers the illusions of "Brüno" and the reality of "Humpday."

The movie works as an “I can’t believe they went there!” comedy. But there’s not much point pretending it examines or exposes or critiques much of anything “real,” or that, half the time, it even knows what its satirical targets are, much less which ones are legitimate. (The sequence with Richard Bey deliberately confuses the black audience’s homophobia and anti-white interloper fury — both of which are aggressively stoked by Brüno’s antics — with their legitimate concern that the boy has a hateful nimrod for a daddy.)

If Cohen made a film in which he played a shuffling, white-woman-obsessed, big-lipped, giant-Afro’d brother who spoke in ebonics and subsisted entirely on a diet of fried chicken, watermelon and 40-oz. bottles of malt liquor, it might be a cult phenomenon, maybe even an unlikely breakthrough smash, and parts of it might prove indefensibly entertaining to a wide audience. But there would be less inclination to pore over its possible cultural significance because it’d be easier to recognize it for what it was: a film willing to do or say whatever it took to get laughs, gasps and big box office; the kind of movie Brüno might direct if he were a filmmaker.

In what might be either a marvelous fluke of timing or a canny example of an indie movie cleverly riding on a studio film’s coattails, “Humpday” — a new Seattle-based comedy, written and directed by Lynn Shelton, conceived with much input from her actors — delves into some of the same concerns as “Brüno,” but more deeply and empathetically. The movie would play intriguingly on a double bill with Cohen and Charles’ latest provocation because it more or less inverts “Brüno”’s approach: rather than a heavily improvised and externalized slapstick riff, one that invites viewers to feel superior to the one-dimensional title character and the yahoos he meets, “Humpday” is built around three characters who seem like types but gradually disclose so many secrets, and so many seemingly contradictory layers, that it’s hard to pigeonhole or pass judgment on them. “Humpday” insists on the essential impenetrability of the human personality. It shows how we are — to paraphrase David Milch’s observations about many of his own characters — mysteries to ourselves.

The film opens with Ben (Mark Duplass), a recently married thirty-something, canoodling in bed with his wife, Anna (Alycia Delmore). The film’s first shot is a close-up of Ben’s hand on Anna’s arm; our attention is drawn to his wedding ring, which will come to represent what Ben subconsciously sees as his enslavement to boring middle-class values. When Ben’s best friend, a goofy bohemian globetrotter named Andrew (Joshua Leonard), unexpectedly shows up on their doorstep looking for a place to stay, Ben is forced to confront his lingering fear of normalcy. Attending a party with Andrew at the home of a lesbian couple with bisexual tendencies and a sexually diverse spectrum of friends, Ben learns of an amateur porn competition sponsored by the local alternative news weekly The Stranger and eggs Andrew into entering it. Channeling their inner pretentious undergrads, they agree that whatever they do has to be challenging, groundbreaking, fresh. But what can a couple of budding pornographers do that hasn’t already been done a million times? Their solution is ingenious: They’ll bone each other on camera and turn the spectacle of two straight guys having gay sex for the first time into an awkward journey of discovery.

This is a great setup for an unmade Farrelly brothers film starring, say, Jack Black and Paul Rudd, but the movie endearingly decides to downplay physical shtick in favor of quiet interactions and uncomfortable silences. Shelton — also a winning actress who plays Monica, one half of the lesbian couple — knows she’s got a terrific comic hook and spends the film’s first third selling it: “Humpday” is about a couple of guys who must have sex with each other to prove they’re not gay.

But while “Humpday” initially seems a fresh riff on the bromance genre and the gay panic that underlies certain straight male friendships, that’s not all it is — not by a long shot. The film’s true subject. and its focus during its second half, is “normalcy”: what it means, whether there even is such a thing, and most of all, the terror of being thought too normal — too ordinary, too typical. It’s predictable that Ben would harbor such fears: he’s a recently settled man who (like Andrew) once dreamed of being a bold creative force and worries that he’s sold out too quickly, or perhaps was never cut out for the rebel-artist life in the first place.

But there’s more going on here. Ben isn’t as strait-laced, or as “straight,” as he appears — which is not remotely the same thing as being a closet case (a reductive characterization that Shelton rejects). “Humpday” embraces the “sliding scale” notion of sexuality, which holds that “straight” and “gay” aren’t mutually exclusive psychological categories, but aspects of every personality that loom or recede depending on one’s social conditioning and circumstances. Although Anna initially seems an emblem of straight female domesticity, a standard-issue nurturer-doormat, she soon proves to have not just an inner righteous fire (her reaction to Ben’s evasive presentation of his little video project is a keeper), but an impulsive, powerfully sexual side. (There’s a marvelous conversation in a kitchen whose subject matter recalls Stanley Kubrick’s misunderstood domestic odyssey “Eyes Wide Shut” — you’ll know it when you see it.)

Andrew, too, is more complicated and messier than he seems — and more insecure. With his backpack, Panama hat and mountain-man beard, he’s a self-made caricature of the Jack Kerouac-style poet-nomad — the sort of guy who’s likely to be the coolest, most daring person in whatever room he happens to occupy. But he, too, fears that he’s not authentic or brave enough — that deep down he’s as much of a square as Ben or Anna.

“Humpday” is about the lengths to which seemingly self-confident people will go in order to assuage their insecurity. In the end, it concludes that categories and labels are psychological shackles: that people are just people, and that in an ideal world, we’d be allowed to be whatever we need to be, without being judged, pigeonholed or pressured to “prove” we’re this way or that. It’s the summer’s warmest, wisest comedy.

Matt Zoller Seitz is our guest critic for the month of July.

“Brüno” opens in wide release on July 10th and “Humpday” opens in New York and Seattle on July 10th, before expanding wider on July 17th.

Correction: An earlier version of this column mistakenly attributed the “Throw the Jew Down the Well” segment to “Borat” when it in fact appeared in “Da Ali G Show.”

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