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ROAD
TRIP
6/10
US
2000
dir. Todd Phillips
scr. Phillips, Scot Armstrong
cin. Mark Irwin
stars Breckin Meyer, Seann William Scott, Tom Green, D.J. Qualls
91 minutes
Road Trip
is a comedy, and I laughed. Not all the way through, and never to
gut-busting proportions, but enough. This is a breezily, unpretentious,
genially upbeat movie, with a few little unexpected touches and delights
along the way. These are welcome, but they also suggest that, with perhaps
just one more rewrite of the script, and just a little bit
of a wilder approach by the director, Road Trip could well have
added up to a whole lot more.
Director Phillips
was responsible for the well-received Frat House documentary, and
his first fictional film is a compendium of numerous campus urban myths,
built around the central tale of a student who inadvertently sends his
longtime girlfriend a videotape of himself having sex with another girl,
and who must then set off in hot pursuit before the package arrives: the
whole film is, in fact, structured as a (tall) tale, told to prospective
University of Ithaca students by tour guide alumnus Barry (Green), to
whom we keep returning as the action unfolds. The central characters are
familiar enough college-movie types: there's the Jock (Meyer as Josh,
the errant boyfriend), the Brain (Paulo Costanzo as Rubin), the Stud (Scott
as E.L.) and the Geek (Qualls as Kyle). Meyer is lumbered with carrying
the plot, and initially his main function is as straight man to wisecracking
Scott - but as the film progresses our focus shifts again, this time onto
Qualls, who only gets to go on the road trip because it's his car the
lads decide to ride in.
 D.J.
Qualls turns out to be a) nothing like the rapper his name may lead you
to expect, and b) Road Trip's real trump card. He's a disarmingly
unlikely screen presence, skinny to the point of emaciation and with an
terrifically expressive gnomish face: a kind of benign, elongated Crispin
Glover. It's intended as a compliment when I say that you'd be forgiven
for thinking he'd wandered in off the set of a nearby John Waters production.
One could hardly imagine two more contrasting young performers than pin-up
Scott (who'd honed his smart-alec routine in Final
Destination and American Pie) and runtish Qualls, but both
are totally keyed into the material and deserve much credit for the film's
watchability.
While Scott
gets most of the script's funny lines, he share the laughs with thoroughly
spaced-out Scott, who features in many of the visual set-pieces around
which Phillips builds his film: just as in American
Pie there was the 'pie scene' and the 'flute scene', and in There's
Something About Mary we had the 'dog scene' and the 'zip scene,' Road
Trip serves up the 'snake scene' and the 'French Toast scene,' not
to mention the 'milking scene' and the 'boner scene,' and the less you
know about these in advance, the better. But while these are funny
and satisfyingly 'gross,' they aren't anything new or groundbreaking.
The toast scene, for example, is just a variation on a trick Kevin Smith
included in his underrated Mallrats (Ethan Suplee appears in both
films) and that came out years ago.
There are only
a couple of moments when Phillips briefly breaks through to another level.
There's a car leap across a stream that's as breathtaking as anything
in Gone In Sixty Seconds,
but which has a 'real world' payoff that's arguably the funniest and most
unexpected bit in the whole movie. The second 'breakthrough' moment is
to do with the film's narrative design: as Green recounts one particular
episode featuring Josh's girlfriend at college in Austin, we see her in
the girl's changing rooms, surrounded by her friends - most of whom are
topless, and notably well-endowed. One of Green's audience breaks into
the story to query whether girls really do go around semi-undressed in
such situations, and the narrator huffily responds to the effect that
this is his story, and he'll tell it how he likes. This casts the
whole of the rest of the film in an intriguing new light - preposterous
developments and exaggerations are thus laid at Barry's door, not the
writer-director's - but Todd Phillips frustratingly doesn't develop it
any further.
In a similar
vein, there are many loose ends that just never go anywhere. Much is made
of the fact that E.L. 'borrows' a blind-school bus, but there's no payoff.
The film' odd structure switches distractingly between Josh and the boys
on the road (to whom rather less happens than you'd expect), Barry in
Ithaca, Tiffany in Austin, and Josh's new squeeze Beth who, due to a plot
contrivance, follows his trail to Boston, then Austin. Most damaging of
all, Road Trip really loses its way in its final fifteen minutes
when it should instead be coming together with a mighty bang. Kyle is
the only character given much of a back story - he's been browbeaten by
his father all his life, and, emboldened by his adventures on the road,
finally has the nerve to face up to Dad (Fred Ward). But Phillips muffs
this crucial confrontation by having it happen among the chaos resulting
from Josh's interception of the video tape at Austin University. At which
point the movie skitters and skids to an abrupt halt, with Barry providing
a what-happened-next summary for each of the main characters.
It's all wrapped
up a bit too neat - rather like Phillips's whole approach. If ever a movie
genre cried out for rough treatment, it's the campus comedy. But instead
Road Trip has a commercial smoothness to its visuals, a blanded-out
glossiness that runs in direct contrast to the unpredictable antics on
screen - even Kevin Smith's two-dimensional "no-look" look would
have been more suitable. I just wish he'd had the nerve to follow Kyle's
example, and really let himself go. Then again, Phillips' approach paid
big dividends at the US box office, where the film was a surprise summer
smash - and I suppose any critic's comments on this kind of film are hot
air, anyway.
by Neil
Young
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