Writing on comedy in 1949 for Life magazine, American multi-hyphenate James Agee identifies four successive rungs of laughter in the language of screen comedians: the titter, the yowl, the belly-laugh, and the boffo. “The titter,” he says, “is just a titter. The yowl is a runaway titter. Anyone who has had the pleasure knows all about the belly-laugh. The boffo is the laugh that kills. An ideally good gag, perfectly constructed and played, would bring the victim up this ladder of laughs by cruelly controlled degrees to the top rung, and would then proceed to wobble, shake, wave, and brandish the ladder until he groaned for mercy.” In spite of Agee’s apparent dismay at the state of comedy when he wrote the piece, this approach has held true through more than half a century of shifting modes and sensibilities, before finally reaching what were likely its last practitioners: the sibling director duo Bobby and Peter Farrelly. In a string of manic farces bookended by the early-nineties classic Dumb and Dumber (1994) and its legacy sequel Dumb and Dumber To (2014), the pair tirelessly chased — and through committed trial and spectacular error, frequently engineered — this laugh that kills. But then something changed: Farrelly struck out on his own and made Green Book, the “crowd-pleasing” 2018 race dramedy that won Best Picture at the Oscars and pissed off almost everyone who cares about movies. The director’s upward mobility through the taste hierarchy from the infamous cum-in-the-hair gag of There’s Something About Mary (1998) to that golden statue — and now his latest respectability pageant, The Greatest Beer Run Ever, which barely reaches the second rung — is in many ways an inverse fall from grace, but Beer Run is both a little more valuable, and predictably, less risible, than meets the eye.
In spite of its unwieldy mishmash of tones, styles, aesthetics, and traditions, there are two primary ways to approach the film: as a Vietnam movie, and as a Farrelly movie. In this sense it belongs to two localized traditions of contradiction and unrestrained id, but only the former of these was inextricably tied to an entire generation of Americans’ cultural and cinematic conscience. The final stretch of the twentieth century, including almost the entire decade-long period we call New Hollywood, was functionally a playpen for American filmmakers to let their counterculture animus and national guilt run wild on screen — an extension of the fact that the Vietnam War was the first, and most widely, televised conflict in western history (an early scene in Beer Run is built around the line, “war is not a TV show”). Beyond canonized works by your Kubricks and Coppolas, the imagery and iconography of the war eventually found its way into exploitation and genre films like Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Predator (1987), Universal Soldier (1992), and Kong: Skull Island (2017). Even films that had nothing to do with the war were positioned (explicitly by critics and subtextually by filmmakers) as tacitly processing it through evocations of cultural imperialism and social upheaval — Taxi Driver (1976), Targets (1968), and Zabriskie Point (1970) come to mind.
And now today, 50 years’ worth of recycled imagery later, we have films like The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020), which uses the war as backdrop for gormless political theatre, and The Greatest Beer Run Ever, which plays like it’s running through a checklist of ‘Nam criteria. It’s got contemporary needle drops set to jungles consumed by fire and napalm; it’s got soldiers who say they feel at home on the battlefield; it’s got a man with a camera who points and shoots at anything and everything, and men with guns who do the same; and of course, it’s got crudely sketched Vietnamese characters that function as stations of the cross for our increasingly disillusioned lead Chickie Donohue (Zac Efron), whose hairbrained scheme to deliver some lukewarm Pabst Blue Ribbons to his pals overseas leads him through lukewarm hijinks to a lukewarm epiphany — in other words, a place in the history books. It does gain some power by teasing out a PR war that’s just as important as the real one (ironically, considering the images it traffics in), but it mostly plays the hits and hews closely to its inherited framework; the bare minimum for a film that follows the true story of a man’s physical and emotional journey from point A to point B.
Point A is his 1967 Manhattan community of Inwood — a microcosm for the intersection of ignorance and desperation — where Farrelly and his three co-writers do some ideological housekeeping. This is displayed through Chickie’s social circle, which consists of his patriotic drinking buddies, his outspokenly-left sister, and a conservative barkeep played with uniquely lazy aplomb (and haywire Noo Yawk elocution) by Bill Murray. Few of these make the kind of impression expected of Farrelly bit-players, but one of the drinking buddies, called Noodle, is defined by a rather potent tendency to change his opinion on a dime the moment it’s challenged by one of his cohorts. When called out, he claims he “just tries to be open-minded to everybody’s point of view.”
It’s the kind of running joke that doubles as parody and admiration, a paradox that’s central to the brothers’ stable of big-hearted buffoons. The Farrellys, in big-hearted buffoon fashion, love everyone (except for select characters you’re very pointedly not supposed to like). This prevailing ethos — which exists on a bizarre continuum with their mean-spirited humour that traverses every kind of “ist” and “phobic” — is exactly what makes their collaborative output as delightful as it is troubling. Affection is extended toward even the most deliberately scummy suitors in Something About Mary, as well as the psychotic pair of cops who wrongfully arrest Ben Stiller’s Ted Stroehmann for murder; Jack Black’s titular Shallow Hal (2001) and Stiller’s character in the 2007 remake of Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid are challenged and criticized for their treatment of women, the former learning to adjust his perception of beauty while the latter remains stuck in a cycle of manipulation and inexplicably doting hotties; Me, Myself, & Irene (2000) has disdain for corrupt bureaucracy and nefarious suits but paints its small-town sheriff’s department with a rose-tinted lens. In other words, you win some and you lose some.
Applied to Greatest Beer Run, however, this big-heartedness is predicated on the assumption that the average soldier is a fundamentally good patriot led astray and manipulated by a two-faced government. While the second part is certainly true, it’s beyond dishonest to pretend that even the lowest level soldier wasn’t susceptible to racist thinking, or more than capable of translating it into violent action. This is where the cracks start to show; films like Apocalypse Now (1979) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) commit completely to their blistering, inhuman spectacles of American ego, both of them doing so with a sense of humour but one that inversely hates everyone that wanders in front of the camera. This trope of Evil Suits (or in this case, evil polo shirts and sunglasses) puppeteering Good Troops is old news — it’s even on display in Me, Myself, & Irene — but it’s compounded when applied to a text that strains at substantive political rhetoric, especially one that acknowledges this mentality in an early scene depicting interrupted protest. Peter Farrelly’s pivot toward respectable, Academy-approved comedies necessitates an atonement for his and Bobby’s past penchant for offensive humour, an impulse that inevitably backfires due to overcompensation, not to mention the fact that they were never interested in reality in the first place. It’s in this sense that the film’s issues as a Vietnam movie arise from the fact that Peter and co. have grafted a Farrelly movie onto it (or perhaps it’s the other way around).
In the penultimate scene, Chickie is trying to put the cognitive dissonance of witnessing his government commit war crimes first-hand into words for a room of expectant boozers, and all he can really muster is that it’s “chaotic.” Bill Murray responds that all wars are like this, and that it’s a “controlled chaos.” Chickie raises his voice and insists that the chaos over there isn’t under control at all. This distinction of controlled chaos can also summarize the differing approaches Peter has taken in his new late period as opposed to the one he and his brother practiced for two decades. “Controlled chaos” is an apt description for their earlier work: the Dumb and Dumbers, for example, are unhinged and unrestrained, the only principle being to make you laugh by any and all means necessary, which reads at first as pure chaos, but they’re also deceptively meticulous and elaborate in construction, carefully and skillfully written as a series of alley-ooping set-ups and payoffs. Green Book and Beer Run, on the other hand, are sedate by comparison; reigned-in, “revised,” and “controlled” in all the least productive ways, but also stubbornly sloppy and tonally unbalanced — so we have neither chaos nor control.
This dichotomy also extends to the distinctive ways each Farrelly period approaches violence. Pre-Green Book, violence was merely an extension of the snowballing hijinks; the most exquisite series of gags in There’s Something About Mary follows Matt Dillon’s Pat Healy as he attempts to drug a small dog into amiable submission to impress the girl he’s wooing, realizing in horror that he’s overdosed it, attempting to restart its heart with a make-shift defibrillator that instead lights it on fire, and finally using water from a nearby vase to douse it, which sends the confused mutt springing back to life. The Dumb and Dumbers, Me, Myself, & Irene, and The Three Stooges (2012) constitute such an outrageous, and miraculously non-fatal, litany of bodily harm that the brothers’ films are frequently mischaracterized as “gross-out” comedies — though they’re certainly not lacking in flinches and winces.
In Beer Run, violence is a tonal and thematic buzzkill; the film never adopts the committedly madcap demeanor of its predecessors, instead coasting on the lightweight charm of its star and premise, but its ascensions up the laugh-ladder are each quickly followed by some kind of come-down, a bruise to Chickie’s ego or worldview that lets the air out of the inherent comedy of his circumstances. In a particularly blistering scene (by far the film’s funniest, and meanest), Chickie arrives in the middle of a warzone, having been flown in by chopper under the assumption that someone so conspicuous and puckishly sure of himself could only be a “tourist” — the military’s slang for a CIA agent. Chickie has the officer call his friend Rick Duggan over to the command tent on the radio, making sure he keeps the reasons vague, and then proceeds to cover himself with a tarp in the corner, eager to surprise a pal who could only be delighted to see him. But Chickie has of course managed to ignore every aspect of his situation beyond its immediate effect on himself, a fact we’re brutally and hilariously reminded of as we watch Rick huff and hustle his way through heavy gunfire toward what he thinks is an official summons by a superior. Duggan, having nearly been killed by his friend’s myopia, harangues him for good reason, literally asking him “you think this is funny?” The line is positioned at the film’s approximate half-way point, and signals a downward spiral of progressively sobering encounters with violence, each one either another crack in his socially learned psyche or a situation that reflects his own selfishness back at him.
It’s the start of a trajectory that sadly veers into well-worn war-movie territory (especially in the film’s atrocity-heavy final third). After all, Chickie is just the latest iteration of the Farrellys’ signature man-child, a new configuration that at first glance challenges the brazen solipsism of his predecessors, but really just goes through the motions of revision and growth. In past iterations, immaturity was actively fostered by the forces of either farcical romance or oafish fraternity (I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention their sweetest, and purest film Stuck on You (2003), which follows a pair of conjoined twins from Martha’s Vineyard to Hollywood stardom), but Chickie’s homosocial relations only serve to undermine him. It’s significant that the film ends with him ditching his drinking buddies to go commiserate with his sister, and even more significant that the sibling is female instead of male. It’s one of the rare occasions of non-romantic male-female affection in their filmography, and the most obvious stab at a degree of self-awareness and self-revision at the level of its author.
It’s all well and good that Farrelly is a Changed Man or whatever, but why is he making movies about it? And why aren’t they good? If he and his brother had adapted this story, say, 10 years ago, it would likely have been their ugliest, meanest, looniest film to date, not to mention a productively accidental satire that doubles as tacit self-confessional. But instead, we have this film, which coasts reliably between amusing and dull, never worse than an eyeroll and never better than a chuckle. At the end of the day, it’s just another Vietnam movie that only cares about the war’s effects on American life, American values, American psyches. No one in the year of our lord 2022 needs this movie, Peter Farrelly least of all. All I see here is the dwindling hope of a future boffo.
