Let me just clear one thing up, lest there be any confusion a few paragraphs down the page. The Sitter isn’t a great film. In all likelihood, it may not even be a very good film. But the mostly-praise you’re about to read about this movie is a reflection of the fact that despite its deficiencies — and they are many — this film is a dumb comedy made by smart people who know how to make you have fun despite what might be in your best interest.
Chief among those smart folks is director David Gordon Green, the one-time wunderkind of serious American independent cinema who’s been happily slumming it in studio comedies ever since he smartly tweaked the stoner action genre with Pineapple Express. Then came his raunchy comedy homage to 80s fantasy films (with a fair bit of stoner humor again) in Your Highness. With The Sitter, Green returns once again to the hallowed and day-glo-tinged Reagan years for inspiration with his update on the basic framework of Adventures in Babysitting. Only with Jonah Hill filling in for Elisabeth Shue, and a hard-earned R-rating. Adventures, after all, didn’t start with Shue going down on her boyfriend, and that’s exactly where the opening scene of The Sitter takes us, with Hill’s Noah pleasuring his opportunistic quasi-girlfriend.
Hill is the second party not to underestimate here. This film finds him squarely back in the comfort zone he so memorably stepped out of for Moneyball earlier this fall: the same sort of sharp-witted slacker with sex on the brain he played in Superbad. The script doesn’t stretch him or ask him to swing for the fences, but as his Moneyball character would tell you, it’s all about getting on base. As Noah, a smart but timid college dropout who takes a last-minute babysitting job so that his single mother can get set up with a promising suitor, Hill has a good-hearted charm that make him more than just the profane, immature big kid he might seem.
As one expects, plenty goes wrong once mom and dad close the door, but given the trio of charges left in Noah’s care, it’s just a wonder that no one dies. The kids are: Slater (Max Records), a 13-year-old neurotic who has to carry around a fanny pack like a security blanket filled with drugs to combat his various anxiety and depression-related maladies; Blithe (Landry Bender) a 10-going-on-20 little girl who slathers on her mother’s makeup like it’s greasepaint and keeps trying to get Noah to take her to the cluuuuuub; finally there’s Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez), a South American foster child with a chip on his shoulder and a burgeoning case of pyromania. Mary Poppins couldn’t keep these kids straight.
Even staying in the house wouldn’t be safe or quiet for Noah, but he tempts fate severely by taking the kids on a minivan trip into New York City when his girlfriend dangles the prospect of more than non-reciprocal oral sex in front of his face, if he can score her some coke and bring it to the party she’s at. Noah’s visits to a drug dealer (a hilariously hammy Sam Rockwell) who makes Tony Montana look seem like the shy, retiring type. If Green’s intents to both celebrate and lampoon the ridiculous excesses of trashy 80s movies weren’t already clear, this scene is a “do you get it now?” nudge overt enough to knock you right over, complete with a rollerskating henchman, an underground gym, and a drug operation manned by glistening, sculpted bodybuilders. Yes, David Gordon Green is fucking with you.
Oddly, the film’s biggest stumbles come when the script plays to what, four years ago, one would have considered Green’s strengths: raw and emotional drama. To that end, the film throws in some ugly daddy issues for Noah, and a number of life lessons to be learned along the way for the kids. It’s all part of the loving play on the movies that serve as inspiration here, but Green allows his tongue to slide a little too far out of cheek in a play for poignancy that never quite pans out. Those sections bog things down and make some sections unusually draggy for a film that clocks in at a barely-there 80 minutes.
This is certainly the slightest and least successful of Green’s comedy work, but say this for him: there’s never any doubt as to his commitment to the material and genuine love for the chance to recreate this type of movie. Each caper, ploy, and getaway is more overblown and ludicrous than the last, but enough of the jokes hit to make it worthwhile. Worthwhile enough to take the trouble to head to the theater? Probably not, but at least good enough to occupy a lazy Saturday afternoon on the couch, which is probably exactly how Green grew to love movies like this when he was a kid 25 years ago.
—
The Sitter
Directed by David Gordon Green
Written by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka
Starring Jonah Hill, Sam Rockwell, Max Records, Landry Bender, Kevin Hernandez
Running time: 80 minutes
Rated R for crude and sexual content, pervasive language, drug material and some violence.
Opens today at theaters across the area.
